Despite Reduced IT Budgets Due to COVID-19, IT Decision-Makers Continue Cloud and Analytics Investments – Yellowbrick Data

There’s new data that shows how #COVID-19 has changed us.

For example, 96% of IT pros say COVID-19 has changed their thinking.  Here’s how:

• 95.1% believe COVID-19 has made their lives more centered on technology than ever before
• 63.8% believe we need a better coordinated worldwide response to pandemics
• 50.3% realize the fragility of human life
• 47.9% realize how interconnected we are
• 46.6% realize the fragility of civilization
• 42.8% believe the world can finally come together to solve a problem
• 42.7% realize the danger of fake news

This research comes from Yellowbrick, the industry’s leading data warehouse for hybrid cloud.

According to Jeff Spicer, the chief marketing officer for Yellowbrick Data, “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. 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.”

Yellowbrick surveyed over 1,000 enterprise IT managers and executives in May to see how IT departments were grappling with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here are some of their discoveries:

• 89.1% say their companies will be focused on cost optimization as a result of COVID-19 disruption
• 84.3% say cloud computing is more important than workplace disruption
  • BUT – 58.1% says legacy computing is more important during workplace disruption
• 82% want hybrid or multi-cloud options to spread any risk from their cloud investments
• 81.8% are willing to pay more for cloud to get increased flexibility
• 67.2% say they won’t trust parts of their business to a single cloud provider
• 66% are accelerating their migration of analytics to the cloud due to COVID-19
• 63.9% are investing more in their data platform and analytics due to COVID-19
• 55.2% say data warehouse modernization is important this year
• 54.6% describe their cloud strategy as hybrid – some workloads on premise, some in the cloud
• 51.7% have decreased their IT investments, 26.4% have kept it flat, 12% have increased it
• 50.5% say the benefit of the hybrid cloud enables them to scale faster without compromising sensitive data
• 43.5% are accelerating their move to the cloud due to COVID-19