Digital transformation isn’t just about the technology you invest in—it’s what you do with it. In 2024, the transformation investments made by organizations will have to earn their keep, as IT decision makers from around the globe told us in our 2023 Bredin Research IT Decision Makers Survey.
We also learned that many businesses—but not all—are finishing up or at least have a handle on integrating and optimizing their transformational tech. In the coming year, they’ll want to see ROI from these investments. Maybe it’s removing a roadblock or changing a mindset to galvanize leadership (or budgets) around the necessary changes to invoke growth.
Read on for the signposts from the survey that point the way toward success in 2024.
New Business Initiatives Will Win More IT Budget
The word “breakthrough” can mean many things. Looking back on 2023, survey respondents’ top business breakthrough was investing in IT. Clearly, bolstering IT’s capabilities and bandwidth in the face of constant demand for new initiatives was important last year—and it’s encouraging to see IT leaders make progress toward this goal.
Forty-four percent of global respondents said their most significant business breakthrough in 2023 was investing in IT systems and software to support new business initiatives, while 20% said their big breakthrough was focusing on data and organizational security to reduce risks to the business.
To Accelerate Digital Transformation, Bulk Up Infrastructure
Digital transformation starts with a strategy, but it needs real-world tactical processes to become reality. To achieve their 2024 digital transformation goals, next-gen IT infrastructure topped the respondents’ list in the U.S., while adopting a cloud operating model was the top choice in the United Kingdom and other European countries. These findings underscore the need to arm IT with the tools and capabilities it needs to align with business goals.
External Factors Will Put Pressure on IT Strategies
Global events can’t help impacting IT strategies—remember what the pandemic did to supply chains? While the rise of AI made headlines, so did conflicts, crises, and compliance changes that keep organizations on their toes.
The top external factor impacting IT strategy in the U.S. and Australia is regulatory change, our survey respondents told us. In Canada, it’s the environment; and in the UK, the economic environment.
Digital and Business Transformation Are Progressing—Where Are You At?
Transformation isn’t one and done—and it isn’t one size fits all. Enhancing agility and accelerating time to market are tried and true objectives of transformation, but two other themes emerged this year as well: improving sustainability and modernizing financial structures.
More than half (52%) of all respondents said that modernizing financial structures was at the top of their list for advancing digital transformation in 2024. In second place was optimizing facilities footprints such as data center hosting (42%) and restructuring talent and skills mix (41%).
We believe that the top goal of modernizing financial structures bubbled up for a few reasons. It’s often costly and challenging to forecast supply and demand in the cloud—and that waste and overspend has ballooned over the years. In addition, the subscription economy and as-a-service revolution have presented lucrative opportunities for organizations to rethink how they procure, invest, and spend.
Legacy Technology Will Get in Your Way Big-time in 2024
In every country and region where our respondents work, legacy technology is what trips you up when it comes to digital transformation. Globally, 34% of respondents said the biggest obstacle to digital transformation is legacy technology complicating new integrations; 21% said lack of budget and resources; and 19% said the biggest obstacle is misalignment between business and IT priorities.
Sustainability Remains a Consideration for Data Storage
Sustainability is a factor in data storage buying for three in four respondents (76%), with minor variations by country and industry. The United States, Canada, and the UK prioritize sustainability if it’s tied to cost savings. Australian respondents said they align all IT procurement with their sustainability goals.
Resiliency Is Evolving, Along with Changing Security Regulations
As ransomware made headlines over the last few years, governments responded with a barrage of new regulations and recommendations. Organizations have paid attention. To improve security, almost half (48%) of respondents said they have implemented, or are implementing, a tiered backup architecture to improve resilience. Forty-three percent said they have moved or are moving to near real-time recoverability, and 35% said they remain committed to strict backup scheduling.
AI Gets Bigger and Bigger
AI is expanding its reach through every corner of businesses. It will accelerate competition, as AI makes it easier to replicate business models and reduces the cost of compute power. It will drive the licensing of data for training, allowing organizations to sell their data as a service. And “synthetic data,” which is data that’s generated by algorithms instead of real-world events, will become common for training.
Over half (58%) of our survey respondents said that AI is under consideration for use in content creation and management, while about another half (55%) said they’re eyeing AI for customer operations. Fifty-three percent said they plan to use AI for product development.
Cost remains the biggest global challenge in deploying AI (38%), while 36% name the difficulties of architecting and managing AI-specific infrastructure.
Good news: Storage Stays Uncomplicated in 2024
The tl:dr for IT teams in 2024: You’re going to be pretty busy. If moving on-premise data centers to the cloud has freed up some of the team’s time, ongoing digital transformation initiatives will add on fresh hours. Keep in mind that storage doesn’t have to eat up the schedule: Learn about 10 ways that Pure Storage® Evergreen™ subscriptions can help you uncomplicate storage, forever in our white paper.
