By Melissa Di Donato
As an IT industry leader, I fully understand the unique responsibilities, challenges, and pressure that come with the job. IT decision-makers must quickly deploy mission-critical applications, while ensuring they are secure and always available. They’re tasked with navigating sprawling, patchwork infrastructures, despite budget and resource constraints. Especially during a global crisis, it’s now more important than ever for IT leaders to focus their efforts on ensuring the technology they deploy drives specific and tangible business outcomes.
Technology, however, is only part of the picture. Clear leadership, agile processes, and access to skills in emerging technologies will ultimately enable companies to address today’s challenges while preparing for tomorrow’s opportunities.
To better understand how IT decision-makers are rising up and daring to be different, SUSE recently commissioned a global survey with Insight Avenue to explore the must-have technologies and approaches taken by IT leaders, and how hybrid cloud and software-defined infrastructure are underpinning IT transformation efforts.
Why Outcomes-Focused Technology Matters
Even before the extreme pressures of the pandemic made it critical to pivot to digitized business models, the survey found that IT leaders do not have the luxury of time in accelerating digital transformation. Nearly 90% see tech investments in the next two years as essential to making a tangible difference in their organization.
A heavy legacy of complex applications, infrastructure, and processes are now being deprioritized. Nearly two-thirds of respondents identified infrastructure simplification as their top investment priority for the next 24 months. More than half also confirmed that modernizing, accelerating change, and scaling the business are extremely important, as well.
To achieve this massive shift in digitization and process, we then asked, “what are the top technology pillars that will support and drive this ambition?” Respondents answered as follows:
Other highlights include:
- Increasing agility is the number one driver of IT transformation efforts.
- Businesses want the agility to support tech transformation and faster results, focusing on security, speed, efficiency and overall cost reduction.
- Nearly eight of 10 IT leaders would like to reduce application delivery cycle times, while nine out of 10 see that delivering new applications and updates more rapidly would improve agility. Containers will play a pivotal role in the speed of application delivery.
- HPC, IoT, and edge computing will be key to this transformation, as 91% of IT leaders see increasing business agility as important to improving their competitiveness, while 89% see delivering new applications and updates as integral to expediting business agility improvements.
- Hybrid cloud is the future, but migration must be simplified.
- 62% say migrating workloads from the public to the private cloud is difficult.
- While leaders know they need to bring in a modern approach, the need for careful evaluation and planning to mitigate these challenges is evident.
- Skills in artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, IoT, and hybrid cloud are inhibiting the speed of transformation.
- In order to fully accelerate their teams into the modern era, IT leaders know that they need these skills, but nearly half of organizations are saying they are hamstrung by it.
- As a result, businesses are rethinking resources and tech team structures.
I understand these needs and see it firsthand every day. For nearly 30 years, SUSE has helped our customers meet their digital transformation goals while showcasing the tangible business outcomes our innovation delivers through our secure, reliable, and cost-effective open source solutions. Built by our community of innovators – the power of many – SUSE enables our customers around the world to simplify, modernize, and accelerate their businesses so they can deliver on what matters most to their customers.
To IT leaders across every industry and around the world, thank you for your efforts and for daring to be different!
Download the report today!
