Many IT leaders and their staff members want to invest more time and funds on systems of innovation that help their businesses to grow. However, in a recent IT Excellence Survey by Unisphere/Information Today of Quest members and other user groups, sponsored by Oracle’s technology products team, we found that the burden of operating legacy systems (69% of budgets) remains a major restraint on embracing technical advances such as the cloud and enabling the realization of new business opportunities. In fact, two thirds (66%) of survey respondents say that maintaining legacy systems is hindering enterprise competitiveness. Keep reading to explore additional survey findings, such as:

• Organizations are spread thin while supporting expanding applications portfolios
• Cloud makes life easier for some IT organizations, harder for others
• Security and control remain top cloud concerns for most IT organizations

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Spread Thin Across Expanding Portfolios

Industry analysts such as Forrester have reported that IT budgets have remained largely steady in recent years. Nevertheless, evolving business unit needs and technology advances have driven the embrace of new systems of innovation, alongside legacy systems of record.

As enterprise applications portfolios have expanded, IT staff support a growing number of applications. In our survey, nearly two thirds (63%) say the number of enterprise applications to support has grown significantly or somewhat over the past 3 years. While a third of organizations surveyed (33%) support fewer than 10 enterprise applications, two thirds (67%) support 11 to more than 1,000 enterprise applications. The greatest number of respondents (39%) support 11-50 applications.

Management expectations are increasing. Management is getting more involved in reporting operations problems, from 21% in 2009 to 32% now. The heat is on.

Despite the challenges, IT service levels continue to improve significantly. For example, 83% of application outages are now resolved in less than 2 hours, versus 54% three years ago.

Cloud Makes Life Easier for Some IT Organizations, Harder for Others

About half of survey respondents foresee a role in the next three years for cloud technology in their development or implementations of core enterprise application suites (57%), ERP (52%), or databases (48%). Managers see core enterprise application suites and ERP as the most strategic or robust areas of cloud adoption, more so than for databases. Staff foresee more even adoption across suites, ERP and databases.

Current experiences show that it is a toss-up over whether an organization will see improvements or greater challenges in managing their technology. One fourth (25%) say that cloud is making it easier or much easier to manage enterprise systems and applications infrastructure. However, almost one fourth (22%) say that cloud is making manageability harder or much harder.

Security and Control Remain Top Cloud Migration Concerns

We asked respondents about the main risks they foresee or have experience in moving systems or applications to the cloud. Two thirds (65%) remain concerned about security and control, including legislative and corporate compliance. This is consistent with original research that Quest conducted in the last two years with Forrester and Unisphere/Information Today, as well as industry analyst reports.

More than one third are concerned about business flexibility and continuity issues, including vendor lock-in, service levels and potential business disruption. More than one fourth are concerned about the complexity of managing cloud deployments and the governance of cloud resource consumption.