industry news
Leadership deficiencies and
skills shortages identified as top
barriers to digital transformation,
finds new CIF research
The latest research from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has revealed that
Digital Transformation is climbing up UK businesses’ agendas as fears of digital
disruption mount. However, the industry body has warned that organisations
will need to focus on upskilling the workforce if their digital transformation
efforts are to be a success.
Conducted in February 2017, the research polled 250 IT and business
decision makers in large enterprises, small to medium sized businesses (SMBs)
and public sector organisations and found that a significant proportion of UK
organisations are keenly aware of the threat of disruption. Two in five (40 per
cent) of respondents expect their organisation’s sector to be significantly or
moderately disrupted within the next two years, and a similar proportion (37 per
cent) expect the same for their organisation’s business model.
Against this backdrop, it should come as little surprise that many
organisations have transformation in their sights. The results revealed that 44
per cent of organisations have already implemented, or are in the process of
implementing, a digital transformation strategy, and a further 32 per cent expect
to have done so within the next two years.
However, 94 per cent reported facing barriers to their organisation’s digital
transformation. Over half (55 per cent) stated that their organisation did not
have the skills needed to adapt to digital transformation, 48 per cent cited
privacy and security concerns, while 47 per cent were worried about legacy IT
systems. Worryingly, just 17 per cent were completely confident that their senior
leadership team would be able to deliver digital transformation.
The research is available as a white paper (20) and can be downloaded
from: https://www.cloudindustryforum.org/content /cloud-driving-business-
transformation
IT INFRASTRUCTURE
Cloudscene
launches data centre
leaderboard revealing
rankings for Q1 2017
Cloudscene has launched a quarterly
leaderboard that ranks the top 10 data centre
operators in North America, EMEA, Oceania
and Asia.
The new leaderboard rankings have
been introduced due to increasing demand
for more transparency and independent
data comparing major colocation service
providers worldwide.
Serial tech entrepreneur and Cloudscene’s
founder Bevan Slattery said, ‘We live in a fast
paced world where there is an expectation
that information will be at your fingertips
24/7 and, until Cloudscene, this wasn’t the
case when it came to finding a colocation
data centre. Now, we’re responding to market
demands for neutral and independent data
that helps with weighing up data centre
operators across important colocation
regions. ’The top data centre operators are
selected from a pool of more than 4,900
service providers listed on Cloudscene.
A combined score using density (number
of facilities) and connectivity (number of
PoPs) is used to determine the ranking.
The results for Q1 2017 can be found here.
SOFTWARE & SERVICES
www.rittal.co.uk