According to a new Gartner, Inc. survey, 64 percent of IT executives perceive a skills scarcity as the most important adoption hurdle for emerging technologies, up from 4 percent in 2020. This year, a shortage of available talent was identified significantly more frequently than other impediments, such as implementation cost (29%) or security risk (7 %).
All six technology domains covered in the report – compute infrastructure and platform services, network, security, digital workplace, IT automation, and storage and database – mention talent availability as a major barrier to adoption. For the bulk of IT automation solutions (75 percent) and nearly half of digital workplace technologies, IT executives highlighted talent availability as the top adoption risk issue (41 percent ).
“The ongoing push toward remote work and the acceleration of hiring plans in 2021 has exacerbated IT talent scarcity, especially for sourcing skills that enable cloud and edge, automation and continuous delivery,” said Yinuo Geng, research vice president at Gartner.
“As one example, of all the IT automation technologies profiled in the survey, only 20% of them have moved ahead in the adoption cycle since 2020. The issue of talent is to blame here.”
Infrastructure and operations (I&O) and other IT leaders have expanded the embrace of emerging technologies to drive innovation as firms recover from the epidemic, despite talent concerns.
In 2021, 58 percent of respondents across all technological domains expect to raise or plan to expand emerging technology investment, compared to 29 percent in 2020. In addition, deployment timelines for I&O functions have shrunk, with all technologies in use projected to be adopted within the next six to 18 months.
“This indicates that organizations feel more comfortable directly deploying new technologies to accelerate growth, rather than relying on an extended observation period to develop the business case,” said Geng.
Furthermore, this year, a larger number of leaders (both inside and outside the IT function) are influencing technology investment decisions, fueling the trend of “democratised delivery.” In 2021, 82 percent of IT executives believe or strongly agree that enterprise leaders outside of IT have an impact on upcoming technology adoption decisions in all technology categories studied.
According to the poll, resilience and strengthening key IT infrastructure are top goals for I&O and other IT leaders in 2021. As a result, they’re putting a premium on cloud deployments and security technology expenditures.
Organizations are heavily investing in developing a solid hybrid cloud platform, underpinned by multicloud technologies, to enable for the smooth transfer of information between physical and virtual sites. Distributed cloud systems, cloud access security brokers (CASBs), and cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) are among the cloud technologies that will be deployed in 2021, with 63 percent of respondents citing resilience as the key investment motivator.
Furthermore, as enterprises combat escalating threats, infrastructure security is a top responsibility, particularly for endpoint devices in hybrid work environments. Between 2020 and 2021, the number of security technologies deployed increased dramatically, from 15% to 84 percent of all examined technologies. In 2021, 64 percent of respondents said they have increased or plan to expand their spending in security technologies, compared to only 31 percent in 2020.
“I&O leaders who do not revise their infrastructure security strategy will face challenges due to the continued rise in the ransomware attack surface for enterprises,” said Geng.
