Networks not up to speed as Kiwi businesses move to the cloud

The continued rise of new technologies, which fundamentally change the way businesses operate and engage with their customers, are responsible for a dramatic renaissance of the IT department.

In New Zealand and overseas, this has led to CIOs facing a range of challenges to contend with, and ultimately highlights a clear need for them to understand and embrace the opportunities offered by the New IP.

The Brocade Global CIO Survey 2015 reports that 75 percent of CIO believe their network to be an issue in achieving their organisations goals while almost a quarter of CIO’s polled that it remains a “significant” issue.

“As more and more New Zealand businesses move to cloud based services to help them compete both locally and internationally, they are discovering their networks are not up to speed,” says Andy Miller, Country Manager, Brocade New Zealand.

“The New IP offers these businesses a way to ensure their networks become enablers rather than bottlenecks, for innovation and growth.”

The survey, conducted by independent research agency Vanson Bourne, polled 200 CIOs across six countries with top findings showing that CIOs are distracted by the business of keeping the lights on.

Over half spend more than 50 percent of their time reactively citing network downtime/availability as one of the most likely reasons especially for CIOs with more than 1,000 employees in their organisation.

Furthermore, CIOs top concerns are security and fast deployment of and access to new applications and services, more than big data and analytics, communication and collaboration, or compliance with regulations.

Given that 40 percent of CIOs claim to be concerned about choosing the right vendors to deliver what the business is asking, Brocade claims the top four technology issues CIOs need to address are: operational platforms (Oracle, SAP), data centre upgrade/expansion, virtual, security, network upgrade/expansion.

“The role of IT is changing from being an administrator of infrastructure to becoming an enabler of the business - driving innovation and new ways of working to revolutionise customer engagement and transactional processes,” says Ken Cheng, CTO and Senior VP of Corporate Development and Emerging Business, Brocade.

“More than ever, the CIO has a critical role in advising the board and senior management on strategic business investments, but legacy infrastructure remains a major roadblock, prohibiting business agility and innovation.

“The New IP offers a way of addressing this, enabling business objectives to be met.”

On the topic of cloud, CIOs accept that cloud is a given (90 percent have some form of cloud within their organisation) but control of cloud acquisition is a different matter with over one third of respondents stating that cloud adoption without involvement from IT is not allowed but does or may happen anyway.

Also, CIOs concerns about non-authorised cloud include its (negative) impact on owned infrastructure performance, inability to manage the network and IT disputes with cloud providers - these are more likely to be worries than security, compliance, poor SLAs, inability to access data or the cost to the business due to duplication of spending.

Delving deeper into the cloud debate, 83 percent of CIOs believe procurement of cloud services without IT engagement will increase while 82 percent admit this leads to fears about their job security, and one in five find such activities cause them extreme stress.

When questioned what most worries them in their role, 79 percent of CIOs were worried about the delivery of new services to support business growth, 77 percent were concerned about delivering better analytics/data mining and 68 percent of CIOs were worried about improving delivery of services, with the same percentage citing fast deployment of new applications as a significant concern.

In addition, reducing organisation operational expenses was a top concern for 65 percent of the respondents.