Flexera Releases 2020 Digital Transformation Planning Report

The report synthesized data from three recent surveys, and more than half of respondents—including CIOs and other senior IT leaders—rated digital transformation as their top 2020 priority, followed by cybersecurity, cloud and improving the customer experience. 

Complete results and highlights are available in the 2020 Digital Transformation Planning Report. The report results are made available under an Open Source Creative Commons License so the data may be freely shared with the required attribution.

“The term ‘digital transformation’ is used for a wide range of things and can support a plethora of business goals and challenges,” said Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Flexera. “With this report, we wanted to peel back the layers and understand how organizations are prioritizing the initiatives needed to succeed with digital transformation – in whichever ways it means to them. We found that digital transformation is often coupled with cloud initiatives, but also needs robust security and governance in order to control risks and costs.

“Successful digital transformation requires investments in technologies, people and processes that drive business value,” Ryan continued. “This includes funding for critical initiatives that support the digital enterprise, including cloud and cybersecurity, and in turn deliver on the goal of improving customer experience. Success also requires effective governance of cloud-based assets and clear visibility into the cost of cloud resources.”

A few key highlights from the Flexera 2020 Digital Transformation Planning Report:

• Digital Transformation and Cloud
  • AWS and Azure have the largest number of companies using their public cloud environments
  • 84 percent of organizations surveyed have a multi-cloud strategy
• Governance and Cybersecurity
  • 68 percent of organizations have passed the tipping point for maturity in terms of cloud adoption
  • 84 percent of organizations report cloud governance is the top cloud challenge; however, lack of resources/expertise (79 percent) and security (81 percent) are close behind as major challenges
  • Effective governance is a challenge for all respondents, regardless of cloud maturity level
• Customer Experience and Budget
  • While centers of excellence often focus on such initiatives as cloud adoption, analytics/big data and artificial intelligence, those initiatives are all essential to improving customer experience
  • 65 percent of companies plan to reduce the number of data centers, which will enable organizations to reallocate resources to initiatives that drive innovation and improve the customer experience
  • Half of organizations surveyed spend more than $1 million per year on public cloud

For more information on the Flexera 2020 Digital Transformation Planning Report

• Download the report here
• Sign up for the report webinar here

Survey Methodology
The Flexera 2020 Digital Transformation Planning Report uses data from two Flexera reports and one Flexera survey:

• Flexera 2020 State of Tech Spend Report
  A total of 303 global respondents from organizations with at least 2,000 employees.
  Panel network includes professionals across industries and context areas, including C-suite executives and high-level IT managers with visibility into their organizations’ IT budgets
• RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report by Flexera
  Subset of 456 respondents from enterprises of 1000+ employees were used for this report (pulled from total of 786 global respondents)
• Flexera 2018 SaaS Survey
  728 respondents in finance, procurement and IT roles from enterprises of up to 5,000 employees were used for this report