Rackspace urges UK businesses to update legacy IT
Rackspace, the world’s leader in hosting and cloud computing, has released the findings of its latest commissioned research which indicates that UK businesses may be missing opportunities around new approaches to technology and continuing to over-invest in legacy IT.
The research, surveying over 400 IT decision makers, including 218 from the UK, revealed that 93% of the UK companies surveyed do not believe that they have a cutting-edge approach to adopting new technology.
The survey also highlighted that less than a third (28%) believe they are ’early adopters’ of new technology approaches, such as on-demand computing, which may indicate a need for better education on the benefits of moving to new IT systems. This finding is reinforced by Forrester’s report* that around half of IT software budgets are spent on maintaining or upgrading old solutions. Therefore, it appears that companies are not investigating how new technologies can support and evolve their business.
Brian Thomson, EMEA Rackspace Managing Director commented: “Organisations are under intense pressure to innovate, but the majority simply don’t have enough time to do this. IT staff seem to be tearing their hair out, with almost half (48%) of the (UK) survey respondents keen to get involved in more proactive, strategic initiatives, but UK respondents indicated that less than a third (27%) of their IT team’s time is spent on them. However, we are starting to see an evolution in the way IT is managed for everything from servers to social media, with many organisations looking to external experts to free up time that will enable them to focus on developing the business.
“Our business is a good example of this evolution in outsourcing servers, where we deployed more than 2,000 servers in the last three months of 2009, taking the total number of servers we manage to almost 57,000″
When considering server solutions, respondents stated reliability (78%) and utilisation (76%) as the most important, indicating that uptime and efficiency are top of today’s server management needs.
Almost half of the UK IT decision makers (41%) stated a lack of knowledge or experience as the biggest concern when calling IT supplier helplines, followed by time taken to access support (36%) a lack of overnight assistance (36%), and rude, unhelpful staff (30%). This indicates a real need for IT organisations to review the level of support they are providing, which can help to avoid customer churn.
Brian Thomson concluded: “These findings indicate to us that organisations are being hindered by in-house IT systems and that there is a real need to focus on strategic initiatives to help the business. We believe this means a new approach to technology is on the horizon as organisations look to hosting, cloud computing and SaaS to power corporate computing and boost competitive edge”
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