IBM asked thousands of executives what their innovation goals are and how cloud infrastructure plays a role in digital transformation in a recent study.
For its study, IBM partnered with Oxford Economics to survey 7,164 C-suite executives in enterprise cloud adoption worldwide. The survey targeted executives at companies that have an annual revenue higher than $500 million.
Four insights:
- The top four business priorities are digitizing existing products and services, recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, improving customer experience and reducing cybersecurity risks.
- Executives were least concerned about using digital innovation to launch new business models and build ecosystem platforms.
- Most executives reported that across their highest-priority digital investments, executing those goals required comprehensive or advanced cloud capabilities, according to the report. Eighty percent of executives said advanced cloud capabilities are needed to recover from and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and to adopt new ways of working.
- Executives ranked the most important hybrid or multicloud capabilities as "important" or "extremely important." Of those capabilities, 85 percent said cloud operation across all environments to be managed from a single location is in one of those two categories, 81 percent selected disaster recovery.