Pure Storage, in partnership with Wakefield Research, has released a new report identifying the obstacles organisations across industries face in today’s digital economy while on the path to modernisation, and the investment priorities they are focused on to support business growth.
The new report, IT Leader Insights: The State of IT Modernization Priorities and Challenges Amid Economic Headwinds, reveals the need to evolve from legacy infrastructure to reap the full benefits of emerging technologies investments.
Survey highlights:
The survey, fielded among 500 IT buyers at companies of 500+ employees, found that:
- More than half of IT buyers are prioritising AI/ML and sustainability technology investments: IT buyers have cited that their top investments planned for the next five years are AI/ML (52%) and sustainable technology (51%). While less than half (46%) predict they’ll invest in infrastructure automation or orchestration.
- Nine-in-10 IT buyers admit to buying tech their infrastructure could not support: An overwhelming 90% of IT buyers stated that the pressure of their Digital Transformation agenda led them to buy technology their infrastructure could not support — and 74% say this resulted in being unable to deploy new technology to leadership’s full expectations.
- IT buyers continue to feel pressured to invest in new technologies: More than three-in-five IT buyers (62%) feel pressured all the time or often to make decisions on purchasing technology based on current needs without fully exploring the consequences of these decisions in the longer term. A large proportion (76%) expect increased scrutiny on purchasing decisions over the next five years.
- Nearly all IT buyers plan to modernise IT infrastructure to drive meaningful outcomes: Nearly all survey respondents (99%) plan to modernise their IT infrastructure to better support future technology investments over the next five years, of which 73% are planning significant upgrades. The top areas of IT infrastructure in need of updates to better support adopting new technology include network and security (58%), data management or storage (52%) and data centre facilities (50%).
Digital Transformation has accelerated at lightning speed, bringing an unprecedented need for IT modernisation. In the face of economic headwinds, IT teams are still focused on operationalising and supporting new digital initiatives, but with the added pressure of tighter budgets and lower staffing levels.
Amid current inflation and recessionary concerns, IT teams must strike a complex balance between supporting critical IT services for their organisation and setting up a foundation on which future initiatives can thrive. With thoughtful investments, organisations can keep vital systems running efficiently while accelerating their ability to keep pace with Digital Transformation.
Barry Cashman, Regional VP UKI, Veritas Technologies
Advanced analytics and Machine Learning offer huge opportunity and ways forward to customer-centric businesses like banks. This technology is crucial in giving better customer insights from vast amounts of data for well-informed decision-making at speed and at more depth than ever before. By placing this powerful technology at the core of their data business, banks have the information to devise and implement stronger plans for growth.
However, while new technologies bring opportunity, they are constantly hungry for data. Handling vast volumes of data does come with increased risks in a variety of ways. Organisations dependent on data are widely targeted through cyber-attacks and often experience data breaches leading to financial loss and reputational damage.
There are plenty of examples of banks that have faced attacks after upgrading from their archaic IT infrastructure to the cloud due to an over-reliance on cloud providers to protect their data when in fact the responsibility is that of the data owner. Exposure to malware from unprotected third-party suppliers has also led to data breaches. A lack of cloud data protection and management skills combined with the challenges of managing data stored on third-party data storage platforms without clear visibility has exacerbated this situation. Regulators are realising that they can’t rely on individual businesses to make all the effort to protect their customers’ data without introducing strict rules and fines to incentivise their enforcement.
The UK’s Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, introduced in March, is designed to reduce unnecessary data collection and to remove some of the burden of the EU’s GDPR legislation which is claimed to be heavily bureaucratic. In reality, the new legislation will have minimal impact on UK businesses with overseas customers or suppliers as they will still need to comply with the laws of the countries with which they are doing business with and so are still beholden by international compliance requirements.
Perry Krug, Head of Developer Experience at Couchbase
Business leaders must understand the significance of IT modernisation and how crucial it is to support their new technology initiatives. From sales to customer service – key business functions are more reliant on applications than ever before, and without a modern infrastructure underpinning the organisation, businesses risk being left behind by the competition. But this is only possible with the right IT infrastructure.
Currently many organisations still rely on an IT infrastructure made up of legacy technologies. These legacy systems just weren’t designed with modern digital experiences in mind. Instead, they are far more transactional in nature, and keep data stored away in disparate, disconnected silos. This makes it virtually impossible to drive forward new technological initiatives, as data remains too difficult to access. To support modern initiatives, its vital business functions have real-time data insights that will help inform their customer, product and service strategy.
There’s also the issue that older technologies, such as relational databases, don’t have the required scalability and flexibility that’s needed for these newer technology initiatives. For instance, developers using legacy systems might not be able to easily accommodate for any changes in demand with a new web application they’re building. This then constrains the organisation, as they’re left unable to create the new digital experiences now demanded, as their infrastructure simply can’t keep up.
It’s only with a more modern infrastructure, such as a cloud-based database platform, that organisations can fully support the new technology initiatives required to power the digital experiences consumers now want. By bringing data together and enabling it to flow freely throughout the organisation, businesses will be empowered to not only drive customer service improvements but carry out new technology projects to benefit other business initiatives. A modern IT infrastructure should work for the business, and not against it.
Mark Hall, Solutions Strategy Director at Daisy
Successful IT modernisation projects are crucial to support wider business goals, such as improving the user experience, upgrading customer service, or being faster to market with new products. An example of this is how businesses today must support sophisticated hybrid working models. Whether it’s recruiting or retaining top talent, staff in many sectors expect to be offered flexible working options, which require secure and reliable remote access to important files and business applications.
To achieve this, organisations must ensure their IT infrastructure can provide effective support. The legacy setups that businesses have previously relied on – where applications were hosted on-premises or within a private data centre and accessed via private networks – is no longer the most efficient way to provide staff with the access they need.
Businesses are therefore rearchitecting their networks, including LAN (local-area-network) and Wi-Fi within their sites, as well as WAN (wide-area-network), to ensure users can access data and applications enabling them to work productively from anywhere. With the growing requirement for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications across multiple clouds setups, businesses are moving towards SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) technology to optimise the user experience over geographically dispersed locations. By transitioning to an SD-WAN setup, businesses benefit from high performance for critical applications and increased networking agility.
Business leaders must ask themselves if their legacy infrastructure is helping or hindering their wider business goals – and if it’s the latter, they should use this as an opportunity to modernise.
