CIOs Concerned About Current IT Infrastructure and Skills

Introduction

A recent study by EMC’s Converged Platforms Division indicates that 69% of CIOs worry their current IT infrastructure and IT skills will not meet long-term needs as technology becomes entrenched across businesses. As a result, there is a greater need for fully integrated technology in organisations, which can scale, adapt and respond faster than ever.

Weaknesses in IT infrastructure

The research, which comprised more than 2 700 business and IT professionals in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), reveals that 41% of the participants agree that extracting value from increasing data volumes is the leading IT challenge facing businesses. Furthermore, 37% percent believe that this will remain a top challenge in 2019, when the need to contain business unpredictability is likely to be replaced with enabling real-time business operations.

However, the findings of the study show that many CIOs fear that their company will struggle to rise above the challenges and utilise the opportunities of real-time business operations. The reason for this concern is that these CIOs feel business growth will expose the weaknesses in traditional IT operations and infrastructure, thereby impeding rather than enabling innovation within the organisation.

EMC spoke to companies where the staff complement ranged between 50 and 1000 employees and found too that in many smaller organisations the IT agenda is left in the hands of other parts of the business, for example marketing (11%) and sales (10%).

The need for a converged infrastructure

Some 80% of the leaders who participated in this survey think that putting a more advanced and agile IT infrastructure in place will provide a sound platform for future growth. Moreover, almost half are already addressing the situation by training IT professionals in converged infrastructure, cloud computing and other business skills.

Barry Cashman, Vice President, EMEA, VCE, the Converged Platform Division of EMC, comments, “A powerful infrastructure will deliver the high performance, scalability and agility the business needs. Too much effort is still spent simply keeping the operational lights on, when the business needs to focus on developing and releasing new, value-added products and services. IT needs to be free to focus on meeting business goals. A converged infrastructure will enable it to do so.”