A new report from 451 Research has revealed how companies are increasingly using off-premises Iaas data environments. Big hitters AWS and Microsoft are among the top cloud providers as the traditional on-premises model is shown the door.
Yet the survey of over 1,000 global IT leaders also uncovered shakiness in formulating a complete digital transformation plan for their companies. Indeed, over 60% of firms had no formal transformation strategy in place, with many admitting difficulty in knowing where to start.
Nevertheless, IT professionals remain determined to crack the code for data migration come what may. Three in five (60%) respondents said they plan to run the majority of workaday IT off-premises on environments such as public cloud infrastructure and Saas. Spend increase was found to be greatest in this area for 2018, as the heft of IT staff recognise the industry shift from on-prem to off-prem data management.
Security predictably remains near the top of the agenda for IT bosses, particularly in the wake of malware WannaCry and NotPetya followed by Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. In light of this 16% of IT professionals surveyed said security will see the largest budget increase this year.
In a finding that will come as no surprise to some, usage of media-hyped blockchain was found to be very low. However, this looks set to change in the near future, with one in ten (12%) of respondents citing blockchain as a top IT priority for 2018.
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“The survey suggests that many – but certainly not all – organizations are finally reaching the point where they can focus on endeavours that help differentiate the business, instead of merely keeping the lights on.” said Melanie Posey, Research Vice President and General Manager on the ‘Voice of the Enterprise’ study from 451 Research. “In 2018 we expect to see much of this effort focused around a new set of approaches to data optimization and analysis.”