Innovation Hampered by Risk Management, Pure Storage Report Finds

Pure Storage in partnership with independent research firm Vanson Bourne, has released a new report on the current trends and challenges shaping global business innovation. 1500 global CIOs and IT decision-makers responded to a survey on how they assess their current IT in relation to their company’s future plans and where the greatest opportunities and challenges lie.

Industry Significance:

Key findings of the report “The Innovation Race” is that artificial intelligence is an important tool for the majority of companies to increase their innovation capabilities and stay competitive. Additionally, many CIOs and IT decision makers spend a lot of time mitigating risk, which impacts their time for innovation focused initiatives.

Survey Highlights:

Strong connection between AI maturity and ability to innovative:

• A full 93% state that AI offers them the greatest opportunities to transform their organisation.
• 80% are already worried that their company will miss the boat if infrastructure is not built to support AI fast enough.
• Well over two-thirds (41%) even state that they want to implement an “AI-first” strategy in the future in order to permanently increase business success.
• In fact, almost all respondents (99.7%) stated that their company is planning, preparing or currently adopting AI.
• In addition to creating innovations, AI is expected to:
  • Increase efficiency for 55%
  • Improve personalisation of the customer experience for 47%
  • Improve the use of customer data in decision-making for 44%

Handling threats and risk:

• 86% of surveyed IT leaders place the reduction of their organisation’s risk profile as their top priority. Risks with the biggest impact include:
  • Cyber threats – 42%; Managing multiple disparate systems – 34%; Rising cloud costs – 30%; Rising energy costs – 28%
• Almost two-thirds (63%) would prefer to spend more of their time on innovation instead of risk and 58% say their business needs require more time spent on innovation.
• A full 88% of decision-makers say it would make more sense to use the budget that is currently being used to reduce cyber threats to promote innovation with IT.
• Alarmingly, the majority (51%) of IT teams are kept so busy keeping the lights on and firefighting that they can’t find the time to innovate which could result in them falling severely behind the competition.

“Many organisations find modernisation so complex they don’t know where to start. However, the findings of this study give hope. Organisations want to reduce the complexity of their IT estate, their tech debt and time spent on fire fighting so that they can fast track innovation, reduce risks, increase AI success and meet sustainability goals,” commented Joao Silva, VP & GM, EMEA, Pure Storage.

Pure Storage has four recommendations to help organisations handle these issues:

1. While the focus on innovation is admirable, there has to be a healthy balance with cyber resilience. A pre-, during-, and post-attack plan for minimal downtime and impact is essential to mitigate risk.
2. To meet performance requirements while reducing data centre power and footprints, optimise with a hybrid infrastructure approach, look into as-a-service/cloud operating model options, and invest in technologies that lower overall energy use, power consumption, and physical space.
3. Honestly assess AI readiness: AI infrastructure should offer predictable performance, easy management, reliability, and lower power and space consumption with a mix of on-premises and cloud.
4. Establish a robust recovery plan with multi-tiered resiliency, immutable and indelible snapshots, and ultra-fast data recovery.

Read the full report: The Innovation Race