SoftwareOne has released a recent study which surveyed 600 C-suite and IT decision-makers in the UK and US, examining how the current global economy is impacting IT priorities. The findings revealed that despite 93% of CIOs expecting IT budgets to increase in 2023, 83% say they are under pressure to make their budgets stretch further than ever before – with a key focus on improved cloud cost management and tackling the reduction of mounting technical debt.
The survey found that 72% of CIOs admit they are behind in their Digital Transformation because of this technical debt, which is of particular concern as 92% of CIOs are expected to deliver Digital Transformation initiatives that act as revenue generators this year.
Some respondents (38%) said the accumulation of this debt is largely because of rushed cloud migrations during the pandemic, with 31% failing to optimise their workloads before commencing the migration process. A further 38% revealed that their organisation miscalculated the cloud budget when provisioning, which resulted in significant cloud overspend. Many organisations also still have multiple on-premises IT legacy systems and 51% of CIOs state that the complexity of legacy IT is one of the top three challenges they currently face.
Just under half (45%) of CIOs surveyed believe having improved transparency and control of cloud costs would help them extract greater value from their cloud investments and therefore improve company buy-in. Others (80%) plan to increase their investment in FinOps to achieve this and 39% say they will use cloud native tools to reduce licensing costs. Despite budget pressures, 82% will increase their investment in application modernisation. Security remains a priority, with 92% increasing investment in this space.
