The latest global market research from IBM found that more than 77% of respondents have adopted a hybrid cloud approach which can help drive digital transformation, yet the majority of responding organizations are struggling with the complexity to make all their cloud environments work together.
As organizations face skills gaps, security challenges, and compliance obstacles, less than one quarter of respondents across the globe manage their hybrid cloud environments holistically—which can create blind spots and put data at risk.
“The IBM Transformation Index: State of Cloud,” commissioned by IBM and conducted by independent research firm, The Harris Poll, was created to help organizations map their cloud transformation and empower them to self-classify their progress. Built on a foundation that leverages insights from experienced cloud professionals, enterprises can use the Index to gain measurable metrics that can help quantify their progress and uncover areas of opportunity and growth.
The Index consisted of more than 3,000 business and technology decision-makers from 12 countries and across 15 industries including financial services, manufacturing, government, telecommunications, and healthcare, to understand where organizations are advancing, or merely emerging, on their transformation journeys.
The Index points to a strong correlation between hybrid cloud adoption and progress in digital transformation. In fact, 71% of those surveyed think it's difficult to realize the full potential of a digital transformation without having a solid hybrid cloud strategy in place.
However, only 27% of those surveyed possess the necessary characteristics to be considered as "advanced" in their transformation. A sampling of findings include:
- Compliance: Businesses believe ensuring compliance in the cloud is currently too difficult – especially as we see enforcement of regulatory and compliance requirements heat up across the globe.
- Security: While businesses have embraced a variety of security techniques to secure workloads in the cloud, concerns about security still remain.
- Skills: As organizations face the realities of a talent shortage, they are failing to implement a holistic hybrid cloud strategy – which can create gaps in security and compliance and cause risk across cloud environments.
"As we see regulatory requirements grow across the globe, compliance is top of mind for business leaders. This concern is even greater for those in highly regulated industries. Yet at the same time, they are facing a growing threat landscape—one that demands holistic management of their multicloud environments to avoid the risks of a Frankencloud—an environment that's so disconnected, it's difficult to navigate and can be nearly impossible to secure, particularly against third and fourth party risks," said Howard Boville, head of IBM Cloud Platform. "An integration strategy to bring together these different piece parts is what we believe separates the leaders from the rest of the pack—the alternative is to pay the price of the Frankencloud."
Security concerns can even hold organizations back from unlocking the full potential of partnerships. As potential security gaps can cause third and fourth party risks to loom, respondents say data governance (49%) and cybersecurity (47%) are the top challenges to fully integrating their business ecosystem into the cloud. In Brazil, cyberthreats are an even greater concern to ecosystem innovation—51% say cybersecurity risks pose a major challenge for businesses that want to integrate business ecosystem partners into cloud environments.
Based on the Index, IBM will launch an interactive tool to serve as a continual source of feedback for organizations to measure their transformation progress. With the ability to help companies assess how they fare against others, the tool will allow them to identify areas where transformation is stalled and where it may be excelling—unlocking the ability to diagnose and act with efficiency even against the real-world of complexity of cloud transformation.
IBM will make the “IBM Transformation Index: State of Cloud” tool publicly available in the coming months, aiming to provide business leaders with valuable benchmarking insights that can inform their hybrid cloud strategies.
The IBM Institute for Business Value also published a new report, "A Comparative Look at Enterprise Cloud Strategy" with an action guide for how leaders can use the Index to help advance their organizations' digital transformation.
For more information about this news, visit www.ibm.com.