UK IT leaders are progressively embracing cloud-first strategies, with 50% of participants to the 2022 TechTarget/Computer Weekly IT priorities survey claiming their organisations now have a preference towards utilizing off-premise innovations.
More than 265 IT leaders from UK-based business, medium-sized services and smaller sized companies took part in this year’s study, which saw participants quizzed on their technology investment priorities for the year ahead.
This year’s report also sought to dig a little deeper into how the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is continuing to form the IT strategies of firms throughout the UK, as well as throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
Among the standout findings of this year’s report is that half of those surveyed as part of the UK-focused survey said their organisations now describe themselves as being “cloud-first” entities, which suggests they prioritise the use and adoption of cloud-based offerings when aiming to obtain brand-new tech.
In some organisations, such as the UK government, cloud-first likewise shows a preference towards using public cloud services– such as those provided by the likes of Amazon Web Solutions (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — however definitions can differ from company to company.
The TechTarget report offers a snapshot of how the cloud strategies and migration journeys of business are developing, especially when comparing the results of in 2015’s IT Priorities survey to the insights gleaned this time around.
As detailed by Computer Weekly at the time, one of the top IT spending priorities of UK-based IT leaders in 2020 was buying technologies to help the migration of on-premise workloads to the cloud, with 36% of respondents declaring the pandemic made it easier to justify these expenditures.
IT spending concerns
When UK IT leaders were asked to call their leading IT investing concerns, from an IT facilities and datacentre point of view, for the 2021 version of the report, the answers provided suggested that much of the heavy lifting included with their cloud migrations has now been done.
Now, it appears IT leaders are turning their attention to making it simpler to manage and protect their cloud workloads across numerous environments, considered that the most popular location that IT leaders stated they intend to buy this year is hybrid cloud management tools, with 29% of the vote.
That stated, moving to the cloud is typically a multi-year journey for great deals of enterprises, with 24% of participants setting out their objective to invest further in facilities- and platform as-a-service technologies over the coming year.
Security, meanwhile, emerged as the third-most highly cited facilities financial investment top priority for UK IT leaders, with 21% of participants electing it.
The UK data form part of a wider body of research, obtained from quizzing more than 850 IT leaders from throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) about their IT financial investment top priorities for 2022.
Again, the infrastructure financial investment top priorities of this more geographically dispersed group of IT leaders suggests that 2022 is going to be a year where enterprises are focusing on refining their pandemic-induced transfer to the cloud, and making their off-premise workloads simpler to handle.
For example, amongst EMEA IT leaders, buying facilities automation innovations emerged as the area where they (28%) plan to direct most of their budget for the year ahead, while 25% said investing in container innovations will be their leading concern this year.
Considered that containers are typically used to make it much easier for enterprises to raise and move workloads across cloud and on-premise environments, this recommends IT leaders are looking for ways to make their cloud environments more fluid and vibrant, while also reducing the amount of manual handling required to run them.
As was the case with the UK data, investing in security also became a leading costs top priority amongst the EMEA respondents.
