The need to accelerate IT operations is perhaps more urgent than ever, as business and other organizational leaders look directly to IT to enable fast business decision-making. The good news is that technology quivers are brimming with tools to support operations acceleration, enabling organizations to speed both insights and outcomes as well as create an effective hybrid cloud ecosystem that is seamless and secure. Infrastructure modernization is evolving quickly, but bumps remain on the road toward cloud-like IT efficiency on premises and effective integration with public cloud infrastructure services.
To determine the current state of infrastructure modernization across the distributed cloud, Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 377 IT professionals in North America (US and Canada) responsible for evaluating, purchasing, building, and managing application infrastructure in their organization.
This study sought to answer the following questions:
- How fast do IT teams need to deploy applications and infrastructure compared with three years ago?
- How are organizations responding to the need to accelerate IT operations?
- How are IT budgets allocated between data centers and off-premises locations such as public cloud infrastructure services and edge?
- What is the distribution of production applications between on-premises infrastructure and public cloud infrastructure services or platforms? How will this change in 24 months?
- Are organizations deploying existing cloud applications or new applications on premises? Are organizations deploying existing on-premises or new applications on cloud infrastructure services?
- How many cloud services providers are organizations using? What benefits do they seek?
- What challenges do organizations face with multi-cloud deployments in terms of application deployment, management, and migration?
- Are organizations using one primary cloud services provider or do they distribute requirements evenly across their providers?
- What tools or technologies are organizations using to enable infrastructure automation? In which locations are these tools or technologies deployed?
- What processes do organizations automate with infrastructure automation tools? What benefits do organizations seek from this automation? What challenges do they encounter?
- What criteria are most important when selecting infrastructure automation tools?
- How important are APIs in terms of supporting IT operational metrics or key performance indicators? What are the key selection criteria for APIs?
- How often do organizations move data between data centers and public cloud services? What are the use cases for this movement?
- How often do organizations move data between multiple cloud services providers? What are the use cases for this movement?
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, technology, financial services, and retail/wholesale. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.
