SoftwareOne Holding AG, a global software and cloud solutions provider, unveiled findings of CIO Pulse: 2023 budgets & priorities. The study, which surveyed 600 C-suite and IT decision-makers in the United Kingdom and the United States and examines how the global economy affects IT priorities, revealing that despite 93 percent of CIOs expecting IT budgets to increase in 2023, 83 percent say they are under pressure to make their budgets stretch further – with a focus on improved cloud-cost management and tackling the reduction of mounting technical debt.
The survey found 72 percent of CIOs admit they are behind in their digital transformation because of this technical debt, which is of particular concern as 92 percent of CIOs are expected to deliver digital transformation initiatives that act as revenue generators this year.
Thirty-eight percent said the accumulation of this debt is largely because of rushed cloud migrations during the pandemic, with 31 percent failing to optimize their workloads before commencing the migration process. A further 38 percent revealed their organization miscalculated the cloud budget when provisioning, which resulted in significant cloud overspending. Many organizations still have multiple on-premises IT legacy systems and 51 percent of CIOs state the complexity of legacy IT is one of the top three challenges they face.
Craig Thomson, Senior Vice President of Cloud and Application Services at SoftwareOne, said. “Businesses are dealing with an uncertain economic environment, which makes planning big IT transformations a challenge. Yet organizations need to move to the cloud and modernize legacy applications to remain competitive. We’re seeing a real need for a combination of innovation with optimization. Our clients are looking for pragmatic step-by-step transformation initiatives, rather than wholesale megalithic projects that can be hard to get approved when budgets are under pressure.”
The survey findings reflect this. Forty-five percent of CIOs surveyed believe having improved transparency and control of cloud costs would help them extract greater value from their cloud investments and therefore improve company buy-in. Eighty percent plan to increase their investment in FinOps to achieve this and 39 percent say they will use cloud-native tools to reduce licensing costs.
Despite budget pressures, 82 percent will increase their investment in application modernization. Security remains a priority, with 92 percent increasing investment in this space.
To see the full findings from the SoftwareOne CIO Pulse: 2023 budget & priorities, go to http://swo.co/CIOPulse.
