Coronavirus fails to dim digital improvement aspirations of business IT leaders, research reveals

Sergey Tarasov – stock.adobe.com

Research from handled service provider 2nd Watch highlights cloud obstacles postured by the coronavirus pandemic, and how business are reacting to them

Caroline Donnelly

Caroline Donnelly,
Senior Editor, UK

Released: 20 Aug 2020 15: 15

IT leaders are continuing to press ahead with their long-term, large-scale digital improvement tasks, despite the short-term innovation challenges posed by the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, research study suggests.

A study, commissioned by handled cloud service provider second Watch, saw more than 100 enterprise IT specialists quizzed on their cloud use practices, and how that might or might not have changed as a result of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

All of the respondents work for companies which create a minimum of $500 m in yearly sales, with annual IT budget plans in excess of $50 m, with 93%of those questioned making use of a minimum of 2 cloud platforms within their wider IT estate.

The resulting 2020 Enterprise cloud patterns report saw the huge bulk of participants (822%) verify they have actually run into cloud-related problems throughout the pandemic, with a lot of (634%) reporting problems with remote employees trying to gain access to corporate systems.

Other common cloud-related pain points that individuals flagged included figuring out how finest to provide remote employees with IT support (574%), handling issues referring to faulty partnership and conferencing software application (465%), and addressing cloud security concerns (455%).

For more than 77%of respondents, dealing with these challenges has prompted them to accelerate their take-up of cloud innovations in various methods, with 33.7%specifying the pandemic has actually spurred them on to pick up the rate of their cloud migration plans.

A further 49.5%stated they are accelerating their usage of cloud to offer extra assistance to their remote workers, while 38.6%stated they are doing the very same to help the delivery of digital products.

As the pandemic progresses, 79.2%confessed to having concerns about the impact Covid-19 might continue to have on their IT strategy in the future, but nearly half (495%) of participants said they feel “very confident” about their organisation’s capability to adjust to that.

Participants were also quizzed about the impact that Covid-19 is having on their long-lasting IT financial investment strategies, with most of the IT executives questioned (604%) specifying that they still plan to continue with any “big-picture” digital change initiatives they currently had in the pipeline.

Out of the respondents who said large-scale digital improvement tasks will remain a priority, 47%said this is because they feel doing so will place their business much better in the long-run.

Where IT spending plans are worried, 64%of participants said their IT budgets have either remained the very same or grown considering that the start of the pandemic. 59%stated their cloud spending plans would increase over the next 12 months, with 23%expecting they would do so “substantially” in that time.

Chris Garvey, enterprise vice-president of product at 2nd Watch, stated the findings of the study are in keeping with the patterns it has seen play out within its client base throughout the pandemic to date.

” What we’re seeing here is consistent with what our customers are informing us and the continued goals of our active cloud modernisation programs,” said Garvey.

” The pandemic might be triggering IT leaders to adjust their concerns, but they’re not backing down from big-picture efforts that can transform and position their organisations for long-term success. As more businesses reopen, we expect need for cloud modernisation services to increase further.”

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