New Research Commissioned by Brocade Shows Critical Infrastructure Issues Prevent CIOs From Addressing Fundamental Business Requirements
A new survey of CIOs worldwide from Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) 
reveals the business impact of legacy infrastructures, and highlights the need for more innovative solutions to businesses network needs. In the Brocade Global CIO Survey 2015, 75 percent of CIO respondents stated their network is an issue in achieving their organization’s goals. For almost a quarter of CIOs polled, it is a “significant” issue.
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. 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.
Ken Cheng, CTO and Senior VP of Corporate Development and Emerging Business for Brocade, commented, “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 revolutionize customer engagement and transactional processes. 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.”
The survey, conducted by independent research agency Vanson Bourne, polled 200 CIOs across six countries. Topline findings include:
· 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 organization.
· 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.
· The top four technology issues CIOs need to address are: operational platforms (Oracle, SAP), data center upgrade/expansion, virtual, security, network upgrade/expansion.
· 40 percent of CIOs claim to be concerned about choosing the right vendors to deliver what the business is asking.
On the topic of cloud, the survey found:
· Cloud is a given (90 percent have some form of cloud within their organization) but control of cloud acquisition is a different matter. Over one third of respondents state that cloud adoption without involvement from IT is not allowed but does or may happen anyway.
· 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.
· 83 percent of CIOs believe procurement of cloud services without IT engagement will increase.
· 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, the respondents answered:
· 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
· 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
· Reducing organizations operational expenses was a top concern for 65 percent of the respondents
Research Methodology
Vanson Bourne conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 200 CIOs from China, France, Germany, Russia, UK and the U.S. in late 2014, to understand the challenges a modern CIO faces in today’s rapidly changing IT environments. All respondents work for organizations with more than 250 employees. 81 percent of respondents work for organizations that have between 500 and 5,000 employees. A broad range of vertical industries are represented.
