02Cybersecurity is the biggest IT infrastructure investment driver

When ECI respondents were asked to name the single most important decision factor driving their IT infrastructure purchasing decisions, their diverse array of answers reflected a wide spectrum of corporate priorities (Figure 4). Variables such as industry, company size, geography, local compliance regulations, business and sustainability goals, and internal IT philosophies and strategies all play a role. That said, among those in the healthcare sector and globally, on average, the leading decision criterion is cybersecurity (13%). Cost was mentioned least often, both among healthcare respondents (4%) and globally (5%).

Figure 4. Top-Ranking Infrastructure Decision Criteria (Q4)

13%
13%

Cybersecurity

12%
10%

Data sovereignty

9%
10%

Flexibility to run across clouds and on-prem

9%
7%

Sustainability

8%
8%

Data distribution across edge, datacenter, public cloud(s)

8%
8%

Ability to easily move existing applications to the public cloud

8%
6%

Application requirements

7%
8%

Data services (e.g., files, blocks, objects)

7%
10%

Data protection and recovery

8%
8%

Regulatory concerns and compliance

7%
8%

Performance

4%
5%

Cost

Healthcare

All

Figure 4: Top-Ranking Infrastructure Decision Criteria (Q4)

03Mixed environments create new challenges and demand for a single place to manage all workloads and data.

Most ECI respondents agree that having a single platform to manage their diverse private and public infrastructures would be ideal. Among those from ECI healthcare organizations, 96% agreed, as did 94% of IT pros from the global ECI response pool. It follows that most respondents mentioned data-centric management, security, backup, and storage issues as the most challenging aspects of managing growing hybrid IT environments that span multiple datacenter and cloud borders.

For example, those from healthcare environments chose disaster recovery most often (42%) as a mixed-infrastructure management challenge (Figure 5). This factor was followed by gaining and maintaining visibility into where all data resides (41%), data analytics and orchestration (40%), and data storage costs (also 40%). Similarly, the global response pool mentioned data storage costs (43%) and data analytics/orchestration (43%) equally as top mixed-cloud management challenges.

Figure 5. Top Data Management Challenges with Mixed Environments (Q9a)

Disaster recovery/business continuity

42%

Data analytics and orchestration

43%

Data storage costs

43%

Healthcare

All

Figure 5: Top Data Management Challenges with Mixed Environments (Q9a)

While 94% of respondents from healthcare organizations agree that tackling their cross-cloud management challenges requires visibility into where all data resides across the extended IT infrastructure (Q11), less than half as many—43%—report actually having that visibility (Q9), marginally more than the global response pool (40%). The visibility findings indicate a capabilities gap that reflects room for improvement in the availability of integrated tools for hybrid IT operations, as IT shops can't manage, secure, synchronize, or analyze what they can't see.

04The overriding drivers of application movement among ECI healthcare respondents in the past year were to improve security and meet sustainability goals.

All respondents in the healthcare sector (100%) indicated that they had moved applications between IT infrastructures in the past 12 months. Four in 10 cited a desire to improve their company's security posture or their ability to meet regulatory requirements as a reason; the same percentage (40%) said they did so to help their companies deliver on their corporate sustainability objectives (Figure 5). Improving data security was also the top reason for moving applications cited by ECI respondents globally, though by a moderately larger percentage (46%).

Figure 5. Reasons for Moving Apps Across Infrastructure in the Past Year (Q6)

Healthcare

All

Improve security posture and/or meet regulatory requirements

40%
46%

Meet sustainability goals

40%
39%

Improve data access speeds

37%
41%

Integrate with cloud-native services

37%
42%

Outsourcing IT management

31%
32%

Faster application development

31%
35%

Disaster recovery

28%
28%

Capacity concerns

23%
27%

Executive mandate

22%
24%

Cost

17%
21%

Figure 5: Reasons for Moving Apps Across Infrastructure in the Past Year (Q6)

Cost played the smallest role in decisions surrounding application movement across all industries globally, mentioned as infrequently as by 10% of those in the construction and property industry and as often as by 37% in the energy/utilities market (though still less often than any other factor). Generally, cost is decreasing in importance as a consideration factor driving infrastructure investments and change. For example, in last year's 4th Annual ECI survey, 31% of healthcare companies said cost had played a role in deciding to move an application(2021, Q17) compared to just 17% this year.

05Cost factors remain a wild card

ECI respondents tend to be fickle in their attitudes toward IT cost, which seems to be inching downward on IT priority lists. For example, it fell last among both healthcare and global respondents' infrastructure criteria and application mobility drivers. At the same time, however, most respondents rank controlling costs high on their list of challenges. For example, 86% of healthcare respondents and 85% of respondents globally described cloud cost control as a challenge with managing their current IT infrastructures, and more than a third of each group, 36% of healthcare organizations and 34% of global respondents, said it was a "significant" one. (Q5)

One explanation is that as the value and volume of corporate data continue to skyrocket, data management, security, protection, synchronization, and backup/recovery concerns are moving top of mind. Data is now a business asset that must stay up-to-date, secure, and readily available for continued operations, analytics, and monetization. In addition, infrastructure total cost of ownership (TCO) has many components that make it difficult to compare apples to apples during upfront decision-making, particularly given that public cloud offerings, pricing models, and fees are in a perpetual state of change.