What Keeps IT Leaders Up At Night? Rocket Seeks Answers
July 12, 2023 Alex Woodie
Want a tough job? Then consider becoming a CIO, who are under enormous pressure to use IT to help their businesses. To better gauge what’s keeping them up at night during a period of economic uncertainty, Rocket Software surveyed 275 senior IT leaders at large companies. The responses might surprise you.
With all the hype surrounding technologies like generative AI, 5G, and virtual reality, it may be a surprise to learn that IT directors and vice presidents of American companies have a largely defensive mindset. Instead of implementing the latest and greatest technologies to leapfrog their competitors, Rocket Software’s survey shows that tech leaders measure their success by how well they increase efficiency, optimize resources, and reduce risks.
According to the survey, formally titled “What Keeps IT Leaders Up at Night: Rocket Software Survey Report 2023,” 62 percent of survey-takers say they have a much greater focus on efficiency today due to the economic landscape. That takes the form of cost-cutting, as we’ve seen with the number of layoffs in the tech sector recently. That focus also reflects in how IT leaders are investing in tools and processes, with DevOps surfacing as one of the top ways that IT teams can boost efficiencies.
Source: Rocket Software Survey Report 2023
Optimization is a perpetual goal in IT, but it takes on increased importance when economic headwinds put a damper on overall growth. Rocket says its survey points to automation as the primary vehicle for resource optimization in IT departments. Hurdles to automation include complexity, resistance to process change, and lack of skillsets to implement automation. Each of these three items were cited by 18 percent of Rocket’s survey-takers.
Another thing keeping CIOs up at night: risk. Rocket’s survey found that 31 percent of respondents say they think about IT risk every day, while 11 percent think about it multiple times a day.
Few IT leaders have their risk-reduction mechanisms dialed in to their liking, according to Rocket’s survey, which found 33 percent are “extremely confident they have the right technology and software in place to execute an effective approach to IT risk management.” A smidge more (34 percent) say they have the right processes in place to achieve that goal, while only 28 percent say they have the right people in place.
To be sure, new technology can help deliver on CIOs’ goals of risk reduction, resource optimization, and increased efficiency. And that’s exactly what Rocket’s survey shows, particularly when it comes to moving to the cloud. But instead of moving everything into public clouds run by hyperscalers, Rocket’s survey shows that hybrid cloud deployments–that is, a mixture of public cloud and on-prem infrastructure — is the number one IT priority.
According to Rocket’s survey, hybrid cloud garnered 65 percent of survey-takers votes, compared to 60 percent for data and content management; 58 percent for both DevOps and infrastructure and application modernization; and 57 percent for automation. Performance management and enterprise storage rounded out the list with 41 percent and 35 percent, respectively.
Source: Rocket Software Survey Report 2023
The focus on hybrid cloud deployments is even more important for IBM shops, considering they run critical applications on proprietary operating systems like IBM i and z/OS, which aren’t readily available in the public cloud. Rocket found that 93 percent of its survey-takers agreed with the notion that organizations should “embrace a hybrid infrastructure that spans from the mainframe to cloud.”
“IT leaders are under enormous pressure to do more with less resources and build an IT department that can optimize an organization’s resources and reduce exposure to risk,” Rocket Software CEO and President Milan Shetti stated in a press release. “Leaders understand that hybrid cloud solutions are the most effective way to leverage the benefits of both the mainframe and the cloud. By pairing the right technologies, processes, and vendors together, IT leaders can modernize their operations without disrupting day-to-day operations.”
Rocket’s survey found that the mainframe and IBM i servers typically house certain types of specialized applications, while other applications and IT environments are more commonly found on the public cloud.
Source: Rocket Software Survey Report 2023
For instance, it found a mainframe was used to run applications customized for a specific industry 54 percent of the time, followed by CRM systems (52 percent); batch processing and data analytics (50 percent); ERP systems (49 percent); and transaction processing and banking and financial applications (49 percent).
By comparison, the cloud was more likely to be housing other types of applications, including data management, storage, disaster recovery, and backup workloads (63 percent); software as a service (54 percent); AI, big data, and machine learning workloads (53 percent); cloud native, Kubernetes, and microservices-based apps (50 percent); hybrid cloud, multi-cloud infrastructure (50 percent); and API-first, serverless solutions (35 percent).
You can download a copy of “What Keeps IT Leaders Up at Night: Rocket Software Survey Report 2023” at this link.
