A majority of CIOs believe that their network is holding their organisation back from achieving its business goals.
A survey from Brocade found that 75 percent of CIOs believe their network is an issue in achieving their goals. Almost a quarter viewed it as a "significant" issue.
In addition, over half of CIOs lose around 1000 working hours a year reacting to unexpected problems, with network downtime one of the most likely causes.
While Cloud had been deployed in 90 percent of organisations, the report revealed concern among CIOs about their future relevance especially around Cloud adoption. 83 percent believe adoption of cloud without IT involvement will continue to increase, while 82 percent have concerns for their job security. 20 percent said that unsanctioned cloud use causes ‘extreme stress’.
Other concerns include the delivery of new services to support business growth, cited by 79 percent, and delivery of better analytics, cited by 77 percent.
Reducing operational expenses was a top concern for 65 percent of respondents, while 65 percent were concerned about "fast access to applications from multiple devices".
Ken Cheng, CTO and Senior VP of Corporate Development and Emerging Business for Brocade, commented, "The role of IT is changing from being an administrator of infrastructure to becoming an enabler of the business — driving innovation and new ways of working to revolutionize customer engagement and transactional processes.
"More than ever, the CIO has a critical role in advising the board and senior management on strategic business investments, but legacy infrastructure remains a major roadblock, prohibiting business agility and innovation. The New IP offers a way of addressing this, enabling business objectives to be met."
The research polled 200 CIOs from companies with over 250 employees in the UK, US, China, France, Germany and Russia.
