For the fifth consecutive year, Red Hat has released its annual Global Tech Outlook. This survey of IT leaders covers the top IT challenges and funding priorities for the coming year.
Surveying more than 1,400 IT professionals from July through September (respondents include both Red Hat customers and the broader market globally, mostly from companies with more than £70 million in annual revenue), the report covers the following four key areas: digital transformation, funding priorities, culture and the state of the cloud.
Key findings include:
Digital transformation
Many companies are accelerating their transformation and optimisation efforts because of the pandemic, although some companies have had to stall their initiatives.
- 85% of respondents are actively pursuing digital transformation initiatives.
- Only 5% of organizations surveyed have not yet started their digital transformation or are just beginning.
- 65% of respondents say that they’re well into their digital transformation efforts, specifically in the “transforming” phase or beyond.
- Integration issues (27%) are the top barrier to digital transformation, followed by security and compliance (26%), and talent gaps (25%)
Cloud adoption
While most are looking at a hybrid cloud strategy, more customers are also shifting to a multi-cloud strategy.
- More than a quarter of the respondents (27%) described their cloud strategy as “hybrid cloud” for the next 12 months, with 17% saying they had a private cloud-first strategy and only 12% planned to standardize on a single public cloud.
- Use of three or more clouds in the next 12 months is expected to jump significantly, 51% say that they plan to use three or more cloud platforms in the next 12 months.
- The biggest shifts are in the Latin American and the Asia-Pacific regions, where they plan to at least triple their usage to four or more clouds.
Priorities for next year
- The top priorities for digital transformation cited by this year’s respondents are innovation (23%), security (19%), user experience (13%) and cost reduction (11%).
- IT security (45%) is the top IT funding priorities next year, followed by IT and cloud management (39%), cloud infrastructure (34%), optimisation of existing IT (29%) and IT automation (26%).
Culture
- 27% of respondents say a cultural change is an important part of digital transformation.
- Only 6% of respondents say evolving their culture is their top priority for digital transformation.
Each year, Red Hat surveys information technology (IT) leaders and decision-makers to learn where they are in their digital transformation journey and what their technology goals and priorities are for the coming year.