COVID-19 survey update: Cloud reliance grows

This piece is an update to our blog post in late March that looked at how IT organizations are being impacted by COVID-19, including insights from TBR’s survey of enterprise IT leaders. The blog discussed how we are experiencing the second wave of impacts from the outbreak, in which widespread business disruption is affecting demand for IT products and services.

In typical IT research, we tend to track trending on a quarterly, semiannual or annual basis. Given that nothing we are experiencing during this pandemic aligns with the typical way of doing business, we have decided to compare how sentiment has shifted among IT leaders over a roughly two-week span. During the first half of April, we refielded our March pulse survey questions, which yielded the following trends in sentiment.

Overarching IT projects remain in wait-and-see mode

A delay in IT initiatives is one of the clear emerging trends as companies ride out disruptions to employees’ workflows and gauge the financial impact of the pandemic. Compared to the second half of March, there has been no change in the status of existing projects in the first half of April, with 42% of respondents indicating they are delayed. Trends have also remained constant in regard to IT budgets, with about 32% of respondents indicating budgets are frozen and new spending is on hold.

Attention is increasingly shifting toward enabling remote work

While long-term projects may be slowing or paused, there is growth in IT teams’ spending on and delivering of remote work capabilities for end users. In the latter half of March, 34% of respondents reported increasing spending on remote productivity; by mid-April, nearly half of respondents indicated this was the case. TBR believes this trend is driven not only by extensions of stay-at-home orders but also by general acknowledgement that a reintroduction to “normal” life will likely be a slow process.

Reliance on cloud is increasing

SaaS and IaaS are among some of the few IT segments that may see increased demand in the first half of this year. Responses from IT experts reflect this trend, with a considerable increase in respondents indicating usage of cloud resources has grown compared to our survey fielded in March. Currently 30% of respondents are increasing cloud usage due to data center shortages while 19% are increasing cloud consumption to offset labor shortages related to social distancing.

The impacts of the pandemic will be lasting

Respondents have not wavered from their belief that the use of cloud technology at their company will increase in the long term due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as indicated by 48% of those surveyed. Further, a decrease in respondents indicating their use of cloud technology will diminish in the long term suggests that companies expect this wave of cloud adoption will be maintained in the future, rather than serving as a temporary fix for employees needing to conduct business remotely.

On the other hand, there are also simultaneous increases in optimism and uncertainty compared to responses from two weeks ago, as more respondents indicated that they intend to return to typical IT strategies post-pandemic or that they do not know how the pandemic will shape their IT strategy.

While the pandemic has a variety of implications across different types of businesses as well as the IT vendors that serve them, our survey data suggests that IT strategies and ways of working will change for many. Contact TBR to learn more from our analyst team.