EMC today revealed results from a new UAE-based study exposing increasing concern among business and IT leaders over the inadequacy of their current IT infrastructure and the skills of IT professionals as organisations plan to run a customer-focused business.
In a bid to enable this transformation, organisations in the UAE are becoming more data-driven, prompting IT to assume a central position in everyday business operations. According to the study, 72% of respondents say the greatest IT challenge for businesses today is the need to transform to a service–based business, followed by the ability to extract value from greater volumes of data. In 2019, these challenges are expected to be replaced by the need to accommodate business unpredictability and the associated demands for rapid scaling as stated by 38% of respondents. Ranking second is leveraging the opportunity to enable real-time business operations. In addition, five years from now, more than half of the respondents want to launch products, services and applications in half the time it takes today.
The research also reveals that due to inadequate infrastructure and tools, business and IT leaders fear their company will be incapable of leveraging new opportunities and overcoming challenges, such as coping with high data volumes, scalability concerns and managing a service-based platform. Roughly two-third (62%) of respondents worry that business growth will put excessive pressure on IT operations and expose weaknesses in traditional infrastructure that could lead to IT inhibiting, rather than enabling innovation in the organisation.
In an attempt to remedy this situation, many organisations in the UAE are taking the initiative to move from a traditional IT infrastructure to an integrated environment that ensures business readiness. For example, 80% of the respondents surveyed feel that implementing a more advanced and agile IT infrastructure would reduce risk and complexity and provide a solid platform for future growth.
Furthermore, 54% of respondents suggest that IT teams are at a risk of isolation as they find it hard to manage the challenges of steadily rising expectations for IT and interference from colleagues in other roles. Hence, organisations are already investing in training IT professionals in skills including converged infrastructure, cloud computing and business skills.
Nigel Moulton, EMEA CTO at VCE, the Converged Platforms Division of EMC, commented: “The research casts new light on current attitudes towards IT within businesses of all sizes. To reclaim full control, CIOs and their IT teams need to stop spending so much time building and managing different infrastructure components. Instead they need to transform IT into an efficient business-focused engine that can scale rapidly in response to changing business needs. One way of achieving this is by implementing a robust, software-defined, converged infrastructure. Convergence can power more agile development and increased speed to market, directly addressing some of the top IT challenges identified.”
Said Akar, Regional Director at VCE, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East region, added: “A powerful infrastructure will deliver the high performance, scalability and agility the business needs. Too much effort is still spent simply keeping the operational lights on, when the business needs to focus on developing and releasing new, value-added products and services. IT needs to be free to focus on meeting business goals. A converged infrastructure will enable it to do so.”
METHODOLOGY
This research was conducted by Arlington Research (commissioned by EMC) in 2016 to determine the perception of business and IT leaders towards the larger role of ICT in achieving their current and future business goals.
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