Organizations need to continually reinvent themselves to stay competitive. However, this is easier said than done, as research by Red Hat shows. Existing infrastructure cannot be easily replaced and expertise that already fits new developments is rare, respondents say.
For the annual Global Tech Trends survey, Red Hat fired off questions to 706 IT leaders. Those surveyed were not just customers of this company, but also individuals with influence over IT choices at organizations with a minimum annual revenue of $10 million.
Many aspire to move to the cloud or otherwise adopt new, more efficient ways of utilizing IT infrastructure. However, for 29 percent of those surveyed, legacy IT appears to be a roadblock to this. In addition, finding the right expertise is difficult (25 percent) and automation is not always feasible, as 21 percent pointed to this simply not being possible. Some IT issues prove difficult to automate, inhibiting workers from stepping away from existing processes. Likewise, there can be other disruptors for innovation at play, such as problems integrating new tools (21 percent) and priorities conflicting with one another (20 percent).
Automation as a solution?
Automating work processes sounds appealing. Automation is therefore taking place in many areas: security (36 percent), cloud services (36 percent) and speeding up service delivery (35 percent) are use-cases for it for many respondents. In addition, they regularly equip Linux servers (31 percent) and Infrastructure-as-Code (30 percent) with automation.
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Another way to reduce workloads (and replace legacy IT) is to purchase SaaS applications. In the EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) region, the ratio of SaaS to self-maintained apps is nearly equal (51 percent in favour of SaaS). However, a hybrid cloud approach is more popular in the Americas for self-maintained apps (57 percent) than in EMEA (40 percent). In addition, on-prem is a lot more common in our region (47 percent) than elsewhere, while people in the Americas have already moved much further toward the cloud at 34 percent. Reasons for running apps on-prem vary, but control over data is key. Security (40 percent), privacy (37 percent) and data sovereignty (24 percent) count as the main motivators for choosing on-prem.
Security raises question marks
In the Red Hat survey, this is hard to reconcile with security priorities in our region. Indeed, it shows that 23 percent of EMEA respondents prioritize those data concerns when it comes to security questions. It raises the suggestion that customers keep their data on-prem and therefore do not give too much thought to data security, privacy and sovereignty. This is in stark contrast to Asia-Pacific, where 44 percent prioritize this issue. It is quite possible that at least in Europe, organizations will eventually become more concerned with these issues, especially with NIS2 on the horizon.
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Red Hat indicates that priorities within security are not optimal at all. For example, it states that the particularly high focus on threat intelligence and XDR (34 percent) is not matched by the relatively neglected security awareness training (17 percent) and supply chain threats (12 percent). One might also expect a priority on hiring more security and compliance personnel, but nothing could be further from the truth: this aspect dangles at the bottom of the security priority list at 10 percent.
Security issues that do receive extra attention in the EMEA region are network security (36 percent), XDR (35 percent), cloud security (29 percent) and vulnerability management (30 percent).
Modernization is still the intention
Security requires a lot of attention, above all because it is always relevant and only becoming more dangerous if ignored. Yet companies do not just want to focus on the dangers, but also seek to take advantage of opportunities. IT security eats up the most costs for 49 percent of those surveyed, while this is true for 39 percent when it comes to optimizing and modernizing legacy IT.
Exactly how this is done varies by region. Red Hat indicates that companies in Asia-Pacific are more likely to opt for a SaaS solution, while Europeans and Americans are twice as likely to want to handle it themselves. Such differences are not common in similar global surveys, Red Hat informs us. Perhaps this DIY approach to apps, especially on an on-prem basis, compounds the problem of legacy IT. After all, internal developers typically have to implement an innovation without outside help. Regardless, companies will hope more than ever to reduce their costs, something that outdated work processes prevent on more than one occasion.
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