IT executives foresee a future of hybrid infrastructures

4 Nov 2013

Research from Accenture shows that businesses are looking ahead to hybrid IT infrastructures and those that are leaders in IT are applying the investment and reaping the benefits faster than their counterparts.

The research report, entitled High Performers in IT: Defined by Digital, provides insights from senior IT executives in more than 200 global companies from a range of industries.

For those companies that were considered leaders in IT among this group, it was found that they were moving to the cloud and reaping the benefits at a faster rate than the rest. One-third of executives at these companies said that they are replacing legacy components with private and public cloud alternatives, and 15pc already centrally manage a fully virtualised, dynamically provisioned hybrid infrastructure.

Companies expect to operate in hybrid IT environments like this in future, according to the Accenture report, but the top performers believe they will still maintain 59pc of applications in a traditional licence model by 2020.

Comparing high performers to other organisations, 40pc see measurable improvements in IT agility compared to 9pc of the others, and 33pc see direct cost reductions deriving from cloud investments compared to 14pc of others.

These high performers reportedly devote 55pc of their IT budgets to delivering strategic capabilities that support growth and business performance, while their counterparts invest 37pc.

Elaine Burke is the host of For Tech’s Sake, a co-production from Silicon Republic and The HeadStuff Podcast Network. She was previously the editor of Silicon Republic.

editorial@siliconrepublic.com