Dive Brief:
- About 44% of organizations move to the cloud to improve infrastructure and data resiliency measures, according to a INAP survey of 500 IT professionals with data center, server and cloud infrastructure responsibilities in the U.S. and Canada. Only 35% look to the cloud for cost savings.
- Companies operate with "on-premise footprints" and have workloads in colocation or cloud environments, but more than half of businesses use the cloud or dedicated hosting environments for operating IT infrastructure, according to the survey. Slightly more than one-third of respondents use colocation.
- Security, followed by easier system monitoring and management, were the top two concerns respondents have in choosing an infrastructure solution. Protecting IT infrastructure from cyberattacks is the top challenge for respondents in 2019, followed by migrating applications to the cloud.
Dive Insight:
On-premise IT infrastructure is reaching its limits. Companies can offload unnecessary burdens, risk and management personnel when opting for modern solutions the cloud provides.
But CIOs already know this. As the budget for talent needed to manage data centers begins to shrink, companies are coming to terms with the fact data center design and management shouldn't be a "core competency," according to the report.
The cloud is heavily shaping how organizations plan their annual IT budgets because it has a reach in numerous areas: software, tech consulting and systems integration, and tech outsourcing. More investments in business technology are congruently an investment in the cloud.
Finding an infrastructure solution that checks all the boxes for a CIO is a part of the bigger digital transformation picture. Transformation isn't possible without taking IT out of the back office.
Though most organizations agree IT leads transformation efforts, according to the survey, CIOs have to champion themselves as business leaders, not just tech leaders. This can create a sense of business value to more tasks that are traditionally IT-facing.