Many corporate IT leaders say their organizations are not prepared for the future IT needs of the business and nearly all are moving to advance their transition to cloud infrastructure, according to a new IBM survey of executives at mid-sized and large companies in the U.S. and U.K.
Of the 380 CIOs and CTOs who participated in the survey, 60% said their company's IT modernization program is not yet ready for the future, according to "The State of IT Transformation Study" conducted by the Managed Infrastructure Services unit of IBM's Global Technology Services division. Nearly one-quarter of CIOs and CTOs (24%) surveyed said their company is just starting its IT modernization journey or has yet to begin modernizing, with about a third surveyed saying they are still in the midst of transformation.
As a result, more than 95% of IT leaders surveyed said they are looking to adopt public, hybrid or private cloud strategies. Of those, many are moving at an aggressive pace. The survey found that 53% of respondents are aggressively pursuing a public cloud strategy, 48% a hybrid cloud strategy, and 45% a private cloud strategy.
"Our clients are looking to accelerate IT modernization by leveraging cloud models—both public and hybrid, data, AI, automation and other key technologies to help shape, scale and manage more effectively massive, complex, global architectures," said Archana Vemulapalli, general manager, IBM infrastructure services—offerings and CTO. "In this rapidly changing digital business environment, organizations can bring in the right technology and the right partners to help aggregate, integrate, build and maintain a scalable digital business, while also enforcing effective governance."
The pressures on IT infrastructures brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have further accelerated the need for cloud infrastructure, professional skills development, and security upgrades, the survey found. More than 60% of technology leaders surveyed say they expect increased demand for cloud infrastructure to be permanent.
Although IT leaders are feeling increased urgency to accelerate their organizations' transformation due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other pressures, migrating to a multi-cloud environment can present significant challenges to organizations with legacy applications running large data pools. In addition, many surveyed technology leaders are not sure they have the right teams in place. Two-fifths of survey respondents don't think their teams have the right skills to fully meet their IT ambitions, and more than three in four said they will rely more on trusted partners that can provide managed infrastructure services.
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