When it comes to the state of IT, few questions weigh more substantially on the minds of CIOs and other business-technology leaders than the degree of success they see in their digital transformation efforts, and foundational to that their efforts to modernize their technology stack.
In a survey recently released by market research firm IDG, and commissioned by services provider Insight, those enterprises that have managed to reach their initial modernization goals report (25% in this survey) success they say that they can quantify in such areas as cost efficiency, availability and customer experience. Sixty-seven percent of respondents said that their modernization efforts are essential to their digital transformations.
There were 26% of respondents who said they are at the beginning of their modernization work. Even still, many reporting significant business benefits including improved quality of service (65%), better customer experience/satisfaction (52%), cost savings (50%), uptime (44%) and the creation of revenue-generating products and services (42%).
The “The State of IT Modernization 2020” survey questioned 200 IT executives at organizations 29,000 employees on average and within a range of industries. The survey examined the maturity of efforts to mature IT operating environments, cloud strategies, applications and processes.
Of those respondents who stated that they reached their initial modernization goals, 19% report having made moderate progress on those goals and 31% said their development has been significant. Twenty-five percent said they’ve hit their initial goals and are optimizing where possible.
Despite 59% of respondents reporting moving forward with their modernization efforts, 41% said they have delayed or abandoned those efforts. According to the survey, they did so due to competing priorities (46%), poor roadmap (45%), concerns about data privacy and security (39%), lack of skills (38%), didn’t or couldn’t budget appropriately (30%), and unexpected challenges (30%).
Not surprisingly, the vast majority of organizations cited cloud optimization as a central part of their modernization efforts and ranked nearly ubiquitous. These included application modification (93%), increasing public cloud workloads (92%) and private clouds (91%), and moving to multi-cloud (87%) or a hybrid-cloud model (89%).
Further, and what highlights the difficulty some organizations have when finding the optimal home for all of their workloads, 84% said they transferred specific workloads from a public cloud to a non-cloud location. These transitions may have been driven, in part, by the 69% who found their cloud costs to be 62% higher than they expected. The underlying causes of those cost overruns range from “data egress charges for shared persistent data, unplanned cloud adoption, and mergers and acquisitions to failure to take advantage of vendor volume discounts, over-subscription and failure to optimize workloads to extract maximum value from cloud platforms,” Insight said in a statement.
Finally, the survey found that 95% of respondents are outsourcing at least some facet of their operating environments to a managed services provider. Eighty-four percent said they are outsourcing cloud management.
Going forward, the most commonly cited priorities include better managing workloads based on their use (39%), improved design to size services to need (38%) and the implementation of additional policies that will restrict the type and size of cloud services made available internally to their organization.
