In fact, 94% of executives believe that legacy infrastructure is a significant impediment to business agility.
These findings come from NTT DATA's inaugural Lifecycle Management report, which leverages NTT DATA's 25 years of data-driven insights to explore the challenges and opportunities organizations face as they navigate infrastructure lifecycle management.
The survey was conducted between 2022 and 2023, collecting data from more than 248 million active assets across more than 130 countries and supported by responses from up to 1,400 senior technology decision makers.
Lifecycle management is a critical enabler of business success. Unfortunately, rapid modernization, the proliferation of technology consumption models, and an increasingly complex and fragmented supplier ecosystem make it difficult for many organizations to properly maintain their technology infrastructure in a way that drives business agility and innovation.
Further compounding the problem, the report finds that more than two-thirds (69%) of currently active hardware (with a planned end of support date) will be unsupported by 2027.
According to the report, only 51% of businesses fully align their technology approach to their business strategic needs, and 71% of organizations say most of their network assets are aging or outdated.
Unfortunately, lifecycle management can also have an even more direct impact on operations: misaligned lifecycle patterns can lead to inappropriate coverage levels, labor-intensive updates, extended incident resolution times, security breaches, and even costly license violations and compliance issues.
“The infrastructure lifecycle is a critical part of the IT management process and represents both an opportunity and a challenge for leadership, as effectively managing it can deliver significant business benefits, from improved efficiency to increased innovation. However, ineffective lifecycle management can also introduce many risks to security and business continuity, and become a significant operational impediment,” said Gary Middleton, vice president, Network GTM, NTT DATA.
“Through the Lifecycle Management Report, our goal is to help organizations enhance their infrastructure lifecycle processes and realize the significant benefits that can come from doing so.”
As you know, previous reports from PwC have shown that the technology ecosystem in Africa is experiencing impressive growth and is evolving rapidly.
The report noted that there is high optimism about the potential the continent can offer by leveraging its strengths: a largely young, rapidly growing and tech-savvy population.
“Nigeria has one of the most established startup ecosystems on the African continent, with companies like Interswitch dating back to 2002. Despite the growth of the tech sector in the Nigerian economy and the significant private funding that African tech startups have secured over the years, the tech sector remains significantly undervalued in the Nigerian capital market,” the report said.
He stressed that the future of countries, businesses and individuals will depend more than ever on the adoption of technology, adding that economic revitalization and wealth creation in developed countries are linked to technological advancements and digital innovation and transformation.
“Today, most of the world's largest market capitalization companies are tech companies that generate much of their revenue from the digital ecosystems they have built. This is a significant change from the early 2000s to the present,” the report added.
