Dive Brief:
- Organizations plan to increase cloud spend despite disappointing returns on those investments in the last year, according to a Unisys report published Tuesday. The IT services vendors surveyed 1,000 C-suite and technology executives across eight global markets.
- Fewer than half of roughly 300 business executives surveyed said they were satisfied with ROI on cloud, generative AI and automation, yet more than three-quarters intend to increase cloud investments this year.
- A growing disparity between how business and IT leaders view tech priorities is hindering progress toward ROI, the firm found. “Organizations are still operating on outdated foundations and processes,” Manju Naglapur, SVP and GM of cloud, applications and infrastructure solutions at Unisys, said in a release accompanying the report. To fully realize the value of IT investments, “organizations need to modernize their infrastructure, align IT and business priorities and adopt a more proactive approach to cybersecurity,” he added.
Dive Insight:
Generative AI and its agentic cousin put a spotlight on enterprise IT systems and their capacity to manage data-intensive workloads. Perennial concerns over technology costs have intensified scrutiny and revealed a perception gap between IT and business leaders.
More than 2 in 5 business executives believe their organizations have already made significant progress with AI pilots and prototypes, compared with less than one-third of the roughly 700 IT leaders surveyed.
As businesses double down on AI spending, IT executives are worried about supporting technologies, Unisys found. More than 2 in 5 IT leaders said their companies’ current infrastructure is not fully capable of running AI workloads.
The disconnect was even more apparent in areas related to security.
Nearly two-thirds of business executives complained that outdated or rigid security infrastructure presents a roadblock to sharing and analyzing data, while only a little more than one-third of IT leaders agreed. Similarly, business executives were nearly twice as likely to cite cloud security policies as a drag on innovation.
Unisys found more unity on cyber preparedness. Nearly 9 in 10 respondents said their organizations respond to incidents when they occur but lack a proactive strategy for preventing attacks.
The consequences of a reactive approach are costly. IT outages cost up to half a million dollars in losses per hour of unplanned downtime for more than 2 in 5 organizations, according to Unisys.
“The next wave of technological disruption is already underway, yet many organizations are still operating on outdated foundations and processes,” Naglapur said.
