Highlights

· According to the recently released Accelerating Digital Agility Research report conducted by Cisco, the majority of CIOs and IT decision-makers plan to make significant investments into expanding Cloud computing and security.

· Most interviewees strongly believe that for the next two years the additional investments might take up to 50% of their company’s IT budget.

· The continuing improvement will push half of the companies not only to adopt SaaS, but rewrite their existing applications into Cloud-native, or move applications to the Cloud.


Last year businesses started the ongoing process of renovating or launching new Cloud solutions, but CIOs and other IT decision-makers believe that’s only the start of long-running strategy and planning.

Therefore, the very center of that strategy is a secure cloud environment, that can ensure the proper tech stacks adaptation.

Liz Centoni, Senior Vice President of Cisco Emerging Technologies and Incubation, said in his interview: “Even as questions remain and new challenges will surface, CIOs and IT decision makers are telling us they need to accelerate digital agility for their teams, so they have the speed, flexibility and choice to consume services across both traditional and modern environments and choice to consume services across both traditional and modern environments.”

Definitely, cloud infrastructure had a spectacular growth of 35% in 2020, while the data center spending decreased by 6%, due to the IT funding priority changes done by CIOs, as the Synergy Research Group report shows.

There is also a very visible contradiction between CIOs expectations: almost one half hopes that their IT budget will be increased for 2021, while another half assumes possible financial contractions, according to the Goldman Sachs Report.

Nevertheless, the main advantage that might work as the main argument in investment proposals is CEOs' awareness about the Cloud solutions and necessary technology adaptations. In the era of COVID-19, Cloud technology stopped being a part of leadership initiatives and became a vital part of the business strategy of every CEO.

However, the cloud deployment itself can’t meet all expectations that some CIOs put on it. There is a serious issue regarding the ‘talents’ and that’s what might build a barrier between plan execution and results. Reports also suggest that half of the decision makers plan to invest in their staff by opening upskilling programs, but another half tends to hire ‘talents’ from the outside.