Brocade has announced the findings out its annual Global CIO Survey. With cloud computing being the most discussed IT topic through 2014, it’s no wonder Brocade’s research found that 90% of organisations already have some form of cloud in place. However, the report was also quick to highlight the many concerns that this has brought for CIOs and IT departments.
While over a third of respondents stated that their businesses did not permit cloud adoption without the involvement of IT, the large majority (83%) admitted that unauthorised cloud acquisition is a phenomenon that is currently happening in some measure and they only expect it to continue increasing. “The cloud computing trend has made business units feel less dependent on traditional IT departments. They are happy to circumvent IT so long as everything works. But chances are as soon as the performance and availability of these shadow IT services don’t meet expectations, it will be the CIOs who will get asked the hard questions,” said Yarob Sakhnini, regional director, MEMA at Brocade.
Most industry experts have predicted that security would be the prime concern with cloud adoption, but Brocade’s survey states that the negative impact on owned infrastructure performance and the inability to manage the network and IT disputes with cloud providers take precedence over security, compliance, poor SLAs, inability to access data or the cost to the business due to duplication of spending.
In recent years, the convergence of mobile, social, cloud and information- Gartner’s so called nexus of forces- have made it necessary for CIOs to become ‘enablers of business’, though their success in these efforts is often undermined by legacy IT infrastructure. 75% of CIO respondents stated their network is an issue in achieving their organisations goals. Furthermore, over half were found to spend more than 50% of their time reactively tacking IT issues in order to ‘keep the lights on’. Sakhnini believes the solution to this lies in the ‘New IP’ which is a critical business tool for unlocking innovation both internally and externally.
Other findings of the Brocade Global CIO Survey 2015 were:
- CIOs top concerns are security and fast deployment of and access to new applications and services, more than big data and analytics, communication and collaboration, or compliance with regulations.
- The top four technology issues CIOs need to address are: operational platforms (Oracle, SAP), data centre upgrade/expansion, virtual, security, network upgrade/expansion
- 79% of CIOs were worried about the delivery of new services to support business growth
- 77% were concerned about delivering better analytics/data mining
Research methodology
Vanson Bourne conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 200 CIOs globally in late 2014, to understand the challenges a modern CIO faces in today’s rapidly changing IT environments. All respondents work for organisations with more than 250 employees. 81% of respondents work for organizations that have between 500 and 5,000 employees. A broad range of vertical industries are represented.
