UK IT leaders show preference for cloud-first strategies

Uk IT leaders are progressively adopting cloud-initially approaches, with 50% of respondents to the 2022 TechTarget/Laptop Weekly IT Priorities Study declaring their organisations now have a desire in the direction of working with off-premise systems. 

Extra than 265 IT leaders from Uk-centered enterprises, medium-sized corporations and smaller companies took component in this year’s study, which saw individuals quizzed on their technological know-how expenditure priorities for the 12 months forward. 

This year’s report also sought to dig a minor deeper into how the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is continuing to form the IT approaches of companies throughout the Uk, as perfectly as throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). 

Just one of the standout results of this year’s report is that fifty percent of those surveyed as component of the Uk-concentrated poll said their organisations now describe by themselves as being “cloud-first” entities, which means they prioritise the use and adoption of cloud-centered offerings when wanting to procure new tech. 

In some organisations, these types of as the Uk government, cloud-initially also implies a desire in the direction of working with public cloud services – these types of as those offered by the likes of Amazon Net Solutions (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – but definitions can differ from corporation to corporation.  

The TechTarget report gives a snapshot of how the cloud approaches and migration journeys of enterprises are maturing, particularly when evaluating the outcomes of previous year’s IT Priorities study to the insights gleaned this time around.  

As comprehensive by Laptop Weekly at the time, 1 of the top rated IT spending priorities of Uk-centered IT leaders in 2020 was investing in systems to aid the migration of on-premise workloads to the cloud, with 36% of respondents declaring the pandemic made it less complicated to justify these expenses.

IT spending priorities

When UK IT leaders were being questioned to name their top rated IT spending priorities, from an IT infrastructure and datacentre point of view, for the 2021 variation of the report, the answers given recommended that significantly of the large lifting included with their cloud migrations has now been completed. 

Now, it appears IT leaders are turning their notice to making it less complicated to manage and secure their cloud workloads throughout multiple environments, given that the most well known region that IT leaders said they intend to invest in this 12 months is hybrid cloud administration applications, with 29% of the vote. 

That said, relocating to the cloud is typically a multi-12 months journey for a lot of enterprises, with 24% of respondents location out their intention to invest even more in infrastructure- and platform as-a-support systems more than the coming 12 months. 

Security, meanwhile, emerged as the third-most really cited infrastructure expenditure priority for Uk IT leaders, with 21% of respondents voting for it.  

The Uk stats sort component of a broader physique of investigate, gleaned from quizzing additional than 850 IT leaders from throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) about their IT expenditure priorities for 2022. 

Yet again, the infrastructure expenditure priorities of this additional geographically dispersed group of IT leaders indicates that 2022 is heading to be a 12 months in which enterprises are concentrating on refining their pandemic-induced moves to the cloud, and making their off-premise workloads easier to manage. 

For instance, among the EMEA IT leaders, investing in infrastructure automation systems emerged as the region in which they (28%) intend to direct most of their spending plan for the 12 months forward, while 25% said investing in container systems will be their top rated priority this 12 months. 

Provided that containers are typically applied to make it less complicated for enterprises to lift and shift workloads throughout cloud and on-premise environments, this indicates IT leaders are searching for approaches to make their cloud environments additional fluid and dynamic, while also lessening the total of guide handling expected to operate them.  

As was the case with the Uk information, investing in security also emerged as a top rated spending priority among the the EMEA respondents.