93% of IT Leaders Believe Hybrid Cloud is the Future of IT

June 21, 2023

We’ve been saying it for a while now: the future of IT infrastructure is hybrid. And now IT leaders are saying it themselves: 93% of IT leaders believe hybrid cloud solutions are the future of IT. That’s according to Rocket Software’s latest report, unveiled today, called 2023 Survey Report: What Keeps IT Leaders Up at Night?

This study aimed to uncover what the biggest challenges facing U.S.-based IT leaders of large organizations are and their approach to modernizing their IT department. The report revealed that IT leaders are losing sleep over improving overall IT performance (60%), data security (50%), process risk and compliance (46%), and the need to improve agility (41%). To overcome these challenges, IT organizations are turning to hybrid solutions to leverage the benefits of the cloud and the mainframe.

For years now, businesses across all industries have in some form or another been migrating operations to the cloud. But systems like the mainframe remain as critical as ever. Organizations can save money and resources—and drive efficiency—by connecting mission-critical content across mainframe, distributed, and cloud technologies with a hybrid approach. This enables organizations to modernize in place, leveraging their existing IT investments, rather than ripping and replacing their infrastructure. IT leaders clearly recognize this opportunity, with 65% of technology professionals citing implementing hybrid cloud strategy as a top priority.

The study also found that IT leaders measure success by three main categories: increased efficiency (71%), optimized resources (67%), and reduced risk (63%):

Efficiency: The current economic landscape has been cause for layoffs across all industries, especially in the technology industry that saw more workers laid off in 2022 than in 2020 and 2021 combined. This means organizations need to find ways to make up for the lost manpower. Modernizing their IT systems and processes to be more efficient is one strategy. Sixty-two percent of IT leaders have a much greater focus on efficiency in IT organizations today due to the economic landscape.

As IT leaders feel pressure from the C-Suite to be more efficient, as well as cut costs and optimize resources, respondents ranked faster DevOps processes, automated processes, and increasing overall output as the top three measures that would be most impactful to increasing efficiency.

Optimization: All organizations strive to be optimized. Optimization of IT resources— namely infrastructure, processes, and people —is crucial to fuel digital transformation and modernization. In addition to hybrid cloud, automation is also of particular focus among IT leaders to help achieve their goal to optimize people and processes, reduce costs, and deliver better employee and customer experiences. In fact, 63% of IT leaders spend anywhere from 6-15 hours of manual data entry and analysis per week.

Risk Management: Managing IT risk keeps IT leaders up at night. They’re starting to take a more proactive and less reactionary approach to risk management—especially as it relates to cybersecurity. But IT risk extends beyond cyberthreats. Hardware or software failures, natural disasters, maintaining compliance (to regulatory pressures like Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel III, and other governance obligations), and even human error all pose threats to organizations’ IT health. 

While 31% of IT leaders think about IT risk daily, and 11% multiple times a day, they lack the tools to monitor and manage it:

• Only 33% of respondents are extremely confident that they have the right technology/software in place to execute an effective approach to IT risk management
• Only 34% of respondents are extremely confident they have the right processes in place to execute an effective approach to IT risk management
• Only 28% of respondents are extremely confident they have the right people in place to execute an effective approach to IT risk management

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. They need the right tools, technologies, and vendors to help modernization efforts. Read the full report or talk to a Rocket Software expert to start your modernization journey today.