18 June 2020
UK enterprises are struggling to bring their digital transformation vision to fruition, due to a factor referred to as the “hesitancy gap”, according to a new report.
Global Data Centers, a division of NTT, said a quarter of IT teams’ time is “wast- ed” laying the groundwork for digital transformation projects – costing busi- nesses an average of £2m a year. Many businesses are employing emerg- ing technologies such as AI, IoT and SDN, but half also claim these projects are “al- ways” or “regularly” delayed.
According to the report, cloud is also proving more of a hindrance than a help in the context of wider digital transformation. It found that two thirds of businesses are “heavily reliant” on multi-cloud services, which adds additional integration challenges. One third of respondents said this additional challenge posed a major barrier to transformation.
“The complexity of connecting a mix of cloud services and other technologies together, adds a significant challenge to overcome before transformation projects can turn into a reality,” said John Eland, CSO at Global Data Centers. “Adding further strain, there’s the risk that even just a proof of concept could have a negative impact on live production systems, leading to service failures that result in reputational or revenue damage. This is understandably causing enterprises concern, resulting in many projects falling behind and innovation to stagnate.” Addressing these concerns, the survey showed that UK enterprises estimate they could shave an average of nine months offdigitaltransformationprojects,ifthey didn’t have to spend time building a partner ecosystem and cloud infrastructure and implementing connectivity. A further 94% of enterprises say their digital transformation projects could be ‘supercharged’ if they could test new concepts in a full-scale, production-ready environment, using a multitude of cloud services, partners and connections–withoutthehassleofpulling everything together by themselves.
NTT is in the process of opening a new London data centre, which will be ready for operation this summer.
