IT Infrastructure Not Up To The Task

The importance of IT infrastructure is the nail that Big Blue keeps hammering regardless of whether the topic is cloud, analytics, mobile, or social (CAMS)–which are topics IBM likes to talk about almost as much as infrastructure. Well, the reality is that any one of the CAMS topics requires some attention be paid to infrastructure, because the overwhelming majority of organizations do not have the infrastructure in place to handle cloud, analytics, mobile, or social deployments.

In a recently released IBM report on infrastructure based on a survey of 750 IT executives around the world, only 10 percent say their infrastructure preparedness is adequate for continued IT advancement and necessary integration. The report comes from the IBM Institute for Business Value, an appendage of its Global Business Services unit.

Among the eyebrow-raising results that were published in this report are insights such as:

• Only 20 percent of the survey responders have a cloud presence.
• Only 30 percent believe their existing infrastructure enables current and future business strategy and competitive advantage.
• Only 40 percent say existing infrastructure plays a role in optimizing revenue and profit.
• More than 70 percent of senior IT executives recognize IT infrastructure as essential in enabling competitive advantage or optimizing revenue and profit.
• Two out of three responses indicated infrastructure expenditures would increase in the coming 12 to 18 months, with more than half predicting that increase to be in the 5 percent to 10 percent range.

What grabs my attention in this report are the indicators pertaining to the cloud. The amount of uncertainty knocks heads with the message that cloud adoption is an avalanche. The survey shows executives are still sorting out what they want in the cloud and whether there is a safe, secure and economical way to move in that direction.

With 80 percent of current workloads running on existing IT infrastructure and 20 percent running on cloud platforms, there remains a lot of indecision. Even the largest enterprises, where the majority of early adopters reside, have only moved 30 percent of their workloads to the cloud. More than half of those surveyed say they don’t know whether they will have new workloads on the Web in the next three to five years.

My take-away from this is that there are many factors pertaining to cloud that have executives uncertain about how to proceed. And although the conversation about IT infrastructure, as IBM frames it, comes down aligning IT capabilities with business objectives and to being equipped to handle new workloads associated with cloud, analytics, mobile, and social applications, the “how do we get it done” part is still missing.

The infrastructure and integration pieces to this puzzle are not completely understood and it’s keeping the brakes on for many companies.

As a side note to the survey on which this report is based, the banking/financial sector contributed nearly twice as many surveys to the study as the next largest contributors, which were insurance and electronics, and more than twice as many surveys as the remainder of the industries, which included retail, communications, consumer products, government, computer services, and professional services.

To get the full report, follow this link.

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