INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud

The study , which recently surveyed 600 C-suite and IT decision-makers in the UK and US examines how the current global economy is impacting IT priorities , revealing that despite 93 % of CIOs expecting IT budgets to increase in 2023 , 83 % say they are under pressure to make their budgets stretch further than ever before – with a key focus on improved cloud cost management and tackling the reduction of mounting technical debt .

The survey found that 72 % of CIOs admit they are behind in their Digital Transformation because of this technical debt , which is of particular concern as 92 % of CIOs are expected to deliver Digital Transformation initiatives that act as revenue generators this year .

A total of 38 % said the accumulation of this debt is largely because of rushed cloud migrations during the pandemic , with 31 % failing to optimise their workloads before commencing the migration process . A further 38 % revealed that their organisation miscalculated the cloud budget when provisioning , which resulted in significant cloud overspend . Many organisations also still have multiple on-premises IT legacy systems and 51 % of CIOs state that the complexity of legacy IT is one of the top three challenges they currently face .

Craig Thomson , Senior Vice President of Cloud and Application Services at SoftwareOne , said : “ Businesses are dealing with an uncertain economic environment , which makes planning big IT transformations a challenge . Yet organisations need to move to the cloud and modernise legacy applications to remain competitive . We ’ re seeing a real need for a combination of innovation with optimisation . Our clients are looking for pragmatic step-by-step transformation initiatives , rather than wholesale megalithic projects that can be hard to get approved when budgets are under pressure .”

The survey findings reflect this . Just under half ( 45 %) of CIOs surveyed believe having improved transparency and control of cloud costs would help them extract greater value from their cloud investments and therefore improve company buy-in . A large number of respondents ( 80 %) plan to increase their investment in FinOps to achieve this and 39 % say they will use cloud-native tools to reduce licensing costs . Despite budget pressures , 82 % will increase their investment in application modernisation . Security remains a priority , with 92 % increasing investment in this space .

“ The next year is going to be a challenging one for businesses worldwide ,” said Dan Ortman , Global Practice Lead FinOps at SoftwareOne . “ The increased agility that comes with cloud computing will allow companies to better respond to these unexpected market changes . Adopting FinOps practices will help them optimise not just their spend but the processes , accountability and transparency required to get maximum value from their cloud investment . Once legacy IT is migrated and modernised , and cloud is optimised , any savings can be reinvested into innovative projects that help the IT team to achieve more with less .” p

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