Yellowbrick Data, the industry’s leading data warehouse for hybrid cloud, announced the results of a survey assessing the impact of COVID-19 on enterprise IT. Yellowbrick Data received responses from more than 1,000 enterprise IT managers and executives, uncovering their infrastructure priorities during this era of economic uncertainty and disruption.
Read Also: How to Increase Your Brick-And-Mortar Sales Without Risking Profit Margins
At a high level—and contrary to conventional wisdom—not all IT budgets are being cut. Even with the economic challenges that COVID-19 has posed for businesses, almost 38 percent of enterprises are keeping their IT budgets unchanged (flat) or actually increasing them.
“The survey brought to light some trends that we have been noticing recently related to the speed at which companies are moving to the cloud and investing in analytics. In fact, more than half of enterprises are accelerating their move to the cloud in light of COVID-19 challenges to their businesses,” said Jeff Spicer, chief marketing officer for Yellowbrick Data. “But what really stands out is that nearly 55 percent of enterprises are looking at a hybrid cloud strategy with a combination of cloud and on-premises solutions. That clearly shows that a cloud-alone strategy is not what most enterprises are looking for—and validates what our customers are telling us about their own best practices combining cloud and on-prem approaches to their biggest data infrastructure challenges.”
Read more: How to Align Your Organization’s Customer Success to Drive Sales
For huge margins of enterprise IT leaders, investments in data infrastructure and analytics are a top priority:
- Data warehouse modernization is important for almost 90 percent of enterprises this year. For 55 percent it is very important, and for an additional 35 percent it is somewhat important.
- Getting more business value from their data lake is important for more than 95 percent of enterprises, with 61 percent saying it is very important and an additional 35 percent saying it is somewhat important.
- For almost two-thirds of respondents, investments in analytical infrastructure are important, with 27 percent investing a lot more and an additional 37 percent investing somewhat more.
Answering the “Why” Behind IT Investments
These are the top four reasons IT decision-makers cite for investing in a new data warehouse or data analytics tool:
- Almost three-fourths of respondents (73 percent) want better performance
- More than half (54 percent) want a solution that is easier to use
- 52 percent want a solution that is less expensive
- Almost half (48 percent) say new enterprise applications require new solutions
Read Also: SalesTech Star Primer: What Is Lead Generation?