Cybersecurity is the priority of companies engaged in digitisation

IT investments to protect networks, infrastructure and data are increasing. Cybersecurity is the priority, even more than innovation. The skills issue remains. These are some of the findings of Red Hat's annual Global Tech Outlook survey, now in its ninth edition, on the status of organisations worldwide in their digital transformation initiatives.

More than 1,700 IT industry leaders from different countries were surveyed to identify key technology usage news and trends.

12% of organisations said they were driving digital transformation in their industry, 23% were accelerating, 31% were in a transformation phase, and 18% were in an emerging phase. In terms of budgets, cybersecurity accounts for the majority of IT investment across all regions and in almost all sectors, with network (40%) and cloud (38%) security scoring the highest, while third-party or supply chain risk management (12%) and security or compliance personnel (13%) were at the bottom of the list.

Cloud security is the top priority for investments in cloud infrastructure (42%). Security and data integrity are the main areas of funding in analytics (45%), surpassing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Security automation (35%) overtook cloud (33%) and networks (30%) services as priorities.

Companies' digital transformation paths are well underway, but do not differ significantly from last year. In past years, innovation has been the priority for digital transformation, but now it is security that takes the top spot, reaching 20%, up 3 points from last year.

Like last year, the most common challenge companies face in their digital transformation journey is the shortage of talent and skills. With an increasing focus on IT automation, security and artificial intelligence, IT managers are rightly concerned that progress on these important initiatives may suffer setbacks without the right skills. It is an evolution of organisational culture, people and processes that is as essential to the success of digital transformation as technology.

In fact, of the non-technology and non-IT funding priorities, 37% of respondents chose technical/technology skills training. People and process skills training ranked third (30%), followed by the recruitment and retention of developers and IT staff (28%).