While over 90% of IT leaders expect their budgets to increase this year, 83% say they are being pressured to stretch their budgets more than ever before, according to new research from cloud software management platform SoftwareOne.
The Swiss company’s survey of 600 IT decision-makers in the U.K. and U.S. finds that IT leaders are focused on improving cloud cost management and reducing their organizations’ technical debt, with 72% of CIOs admitting that they are behind in their digital transformation because of that technical debt.
According to the company’s research, this is concerning, as 92% of CIOs are expected to deliver digital transformation initiatives that act as revenue generators this year.
As they are being pressured to essentially do more with less, CIOs are still dealing with technical debt due to rushed cloud migrations as a result of a transition to distributed work during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 38% of IT leaders agreeing to that sentiment.
In addition, 31% say their cloud workloads were not optimized before they began their cloud migrations, and 38% said they miscalculated their cloud budgets when providing SaaS apps, resulting in significant overspending on the cloud.
Organizations are also still struggling with their on-premises legacy systems, with 51% of CIOs saying the growing complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud IT systems is one of the their top three challenges.
Nearly half of CIOs say they need improved transparency and control of cloud costs to help them maximize value of cloud investments and improve buy-in from business executives, and 80% plan to increase their investment in FinOps to achieve this, SoftwareOne says in its report.
Despite budget pressures, 82% will increase their investment in application modernization, and 912 will continue increasing security investments.
Craig Thomson, senior vice president of cloud and application services at SoftwareOne, says in a statement that businesses are struggling to complete IT transformations as they deal with budget pressures.
“Yet organizations need to move to the cloud and modernize legacy applications to remain competitive,” Thomson says. “We’re seeing a real need for a combination of innovation with optimization. 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.”
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