Cloud and hybrid technology tops the priority list for businesses

Cloud and hybrid IT are one of the top five most important tools in their organisation's technology strategy, according to 95% of IT professionals participating in a survey of more than 800 IT workers conducted by SolarWinds.

Of these, 77% of respondents said that cloud technology topped their list of most important technologies, and was the most useful for digital transformation efforts.

The primary reason for this is that cloud and hybrid IT meet the current needs of businesses, but also serve as the backbone to future trends like machine learning and artificial intelligence. Many of the principles of cloud implementation support scalability for future growth, as well as flexibility to add and take away services as needed.

However, 63% of respondents also said that cloud and hybrid IT were the biggest challenges when it came to implementation and rollout, suggesting that although they understand its value, the day-to-day practicalities are still proving difficult for businesses looking to make the most of cloud technologies.

In second place, seen as one of the most important technologies in use today by 86% of IT professionals, is automation. This also scored highly as a technology with the greatest potential to provide productivity and efficiency benefits, as well as return on investment in the future.

Big data analytics were also rated highly as an important tool for organisations at present, with 79% of IT professionals including it in their top five choices. It was also seen as the number two priority in terms of digital transformation over the next few years. 

One challenge regarding the implementation of cloud and data analytics technologies is inadequate infrastructure and a lack of organisational strategy, which the survey highlights as being a common reason why the IT professionals' current systems aren't optimised.

But as cloud providers are making it increasingly easier to move to the cloud and removing barriers to adoption, it is the business itself which will need to adapt in order to use these technologies with full effect.