Most IT buyers feel pressure to expand past what infrastructure can support, survey finds

Record temperatures aside, the vast majority of IT buyers say they feel the heat to make purchases they know their infrastructure can’t support, according to a recent report by flash storage firm Pure Storage.

As part of its report on the state of IT modernization, Pure Storage commissioned a Wakefield Research poll of 500 IT buyers across the US and Europe. It found 90% of respondents felt like they were under pressure to purchase technology their organizations didn’t have the technical resources in place to adequately support, while 62% said they felt pressure on their decisions “all the time or often.”

According to the survey, 80% of IT buyers plan to “invest in emerging technologies due to the current economic environment,” with around one-third of those anticipating larger spend. Just over three out of four expected increased scrutiny around their decisions on which tech to buy and when–while nearly as many reported that inadequate infrastructure meant they weren’t able to meet leadership’s expectations around implementation.

Shawn Rosemarin, VP of R&D, customer engineering at Pure Storage, told IT Brew the survey reflects the tumultuous past few years: Organizations went through a “decade’s worth of innovation packed into 18 or 24 months” and “put a tremendous amount of pressure on it to deploy at a scale at a pace that hadn’t been seen before.”

Systems of record–traditional databases and back office systems like SAP and Oracle–haven’t changed all that much, Rosemarin said. But systems of engagement, including apps, web services, and other user-oriented systems, “have multiplied at a tremendous rate” and overtaken everything from retail storefronts to human-human interaction.

“These weren’t just pet projects, these were full-scale initiatives at a full scale of deployment,” Rosemarin told IT Brew. But with a murky economic outlook in 2023 and beyond, he added, “A lot of these organizations are trying to think about, ‘Where’s the money going to come from? How am I going to continue to support the scale of all these initiatives that are there that have to be supported?’”

Storage is one area where IT buyers may find their infrastructure particularly outdated, according to Rosemarin. He said that while organizations have been able to drive efficiency gains through virtualization and software-defined networking, most data storage architectures are built on legacy tech. (Rosemarin has projected that the mechanical hard drive market will be dead by 2028.)

The top areas of infrastructure that respondents to the survey said need to be updated are network and security (58%), data management/storage (52%), and data center facilities (50%); 99% said they plan to update IT infrastructure within five years, and 73% planned “significant upgrades.” Slightly over half named machine learning/AI and sustainable tech as two of the areas they planned to invest in, followed closely by infrastructure automation/orchestration.

Rosemarin advised enterprises to keep in mind that infrastructure is key to the success of IT modernization initiatives.

Most failures aren’t “because the software they bought was wrong,” he told IT Brew. “In fact, we see a lot of shelfware sitting in some of these organizations, and there’s nothing wrong with the software titles they bought. The problem was…they put it on top of an IT foundation that simply could not support any more from a performance standpoint, from a scale standpoint, etc.”