Research from Sungard Availability Services, a provider of information availability through managed IT, cloud and recovery services, has revealed a dark side to hybrid IT systems.
Sungard’s findings based on a study which questioned 150 senior IT decision makers in UK organizations with more than 500 employees with an average IT spend of around £36m per year, found that over half of UK organizations believe that the complexity of their IT environment is hindering their ability to innovate.
This is a worrying statistic given that hybrid systems are intended to accelerate agility rather than stifle innovation. Sungard revealed that as increasing numbers of businesses turn to the hybrid IT strategy, IT complexity is accelerating with nearly half (47 percent) of the UK IT decision makers rating their current IT environment as either very or extremely complex.
To quantify this complexity, respondents are indicating that hybrid IT is adding significant cost to the running of IT estates, with nearly a third of UK organizations (31 percent) having seen an increase in operating costs thanks to hybrid IT, adding an average of £251,868 every year. Ironically, over half (53 percent) of IT decision makers claimed that the complexity of their Hybrid IT estate is hindering innovation in their organization.
As Badreddine Laroussi, Group CIO, TDA Capital, commented: "The whole point of moving to a hybrid IT approach is to increase business agility. Technology is changing all the times, with new applications and services appearing on a weekly basis -- organizations need an approach that can take advantage of this, allowing the right solutions to be brought into the IT estate whenever they become available"
"Of course, this requires careful planning: which applications would suit a cloud environment and which would be better elsewhere? Do you have the skill sets needed to make a success of this approach?".
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