Digital acceleration was the buzzword at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic because companies were forced to shift their businesses to digital platforms. But the latest study from ASG Technologies found there are still organizations whose content management and information technology (IT) systems are antiquated.

ASG Technologies is an enterprise information management and IT System Management solutions technology firm.

The report titled “What’s Slowing Modernisation? Barriers Hindering Enterprise IT Systems and Content Management” is based on findings from a survey of approximately 250 professionals who manage content and enterprise IT systems. The report highlights the importance of a clear path toward modernization that prioritizes content governance and hybrid infrastructure that supports digital acceleration.

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“The COVID-19 pandemic was a catalyst for digital transformation for many enterprises,” said Kyle McNabb, senior vice president, product marketing at ASG. “Organizations were forced to quickly invest in tools that would allow them to enable and support remote teams, which sped up investments in solutions like hybrid cloud and team collaboration by years. The unintended consequence is it also introduced new business and technology challenges and risks that cannot be overlooked. Leaders of firms, and chief information officers (CIO) in particular, must accelerate their modernization efforts to embrace new ways of working, complex privacy and regulatory demands, and infrastructures spanning mainframe to cloud.”

Value of content

According to the report, organizations today know that information is their most valuable asset, but 56% are struggling to realize the full value of their content. ASG Technologies attribute this to unstructured data organizations wherein 75% of survey respondents stated that at least some of their organization’s data is unstructured and 44% responding that unstructured data makes up half or more of their organization’s information.

Thirty percent (30%) of respondents note that most, if not all, of their data, are “dark,” which means that it has been collected, processed, and stored, but not classified and contextualized for use. Only 26% of respondents noted that their content is managed in a repository, while 32% reported that content still exists in paper files.

Content governance

The ASG Technologies report also found that while companies are aware of the importance of realizing the full value of information, 66% of respondents reported that their organization does not have modern content governance processes. With the move to remote work, modern content governance has become even more important for organizations but is often a struggle to put into practice, as showcased by the top barriers to implementation, which include employees saving content on shared/personal drives (41%) and migrating to the cloud (38%).

The accelerated shift to remote work exacerbated many of the issues organizations were facing, with more than one-third struggling with storing content for too long (37%), limiting control and access to the right people (35%), and retaining redundant/unnecessary information (35%).

The survey found 3 in 10 respondents identified risk of non-compliance with industry regulations and 26% identified risk of non-compliance with privacy regulations as a key concern related to content governance.

Mainframe

While many organizations are prioritizing cloud, the mainframe is still the backbone of many industries, with 49% of respondents noting that most, if not all, of their core business functions still run on the mainframe. As such, modernizing the mainframe is critical – and many have already begun the process.

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of respondents say that their organization has already adopted DevOps on the mainframe, and another 30% want to.

Thirty-five percent (35%) of respondents believe the biggest challenge with their mainframe performance/optimization is increasing workloads on the mainframe due to increased engagement from distributed and cloud systems, while 27% of respondents say the skills gap is the biggest challenge with their mainframe performance.

Hybrid infrastructure

Mainframe is still at the core of many organizations’ core business functions, but hybrid cloud has emerged as the IT infrastructure of the future, with 67% of respondents noting that they have a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Hybrid cloud has allowed 68% of organizations to move most, if not all, of their commodity workloads and applications from the mainframe to the cloud while keeping systems of records that provide a competitive advantage, like customer data and business IP, on the mainframe.

Seventy-five percent (75%) of respondents replied that capacity flexibility is the reason they are moving workloads to the cloud, while other respondents note that it is because the cloud offers better performance for certain workloads that aren’t as mission-critical (70%) or better access with remote work (43%).