UK lagging behind in IT, Cisco report suggests

A new report by networking giant Cisco suggests that, while global confidence in IT departments is on the up, the UK is lagging behind in many areas.

The company's annual IT Impact Survey shows that while on average 63 per cent of IT professionals are very confident in their department's ability to respond to business needs, this figure drops to 53 per cent in the UK.

Similarly, while the global average for the involvement of IT during the planning phase of rolling out new applications is 59, that figure drops to 53 in the UK.

Additionally, at 35 per cent, IT decision makers in the UK are amongst the least likely to currently be evaluating software defined networking, and are the most likely (30 per cent) to know nothing about the technology.

Finally, UK-based IT professionals have the least frequent contact with business leaders within their company, with only 34 per cent reporting they collaborate on a minimum weekly basis, compared to an average of 47 per cent.

Nevertheless, the overall picture across the 13 countries surveyed by Cisco is positive. 89 per cent of IT leaders collaborate with their business leaders more than once a month and 71 per cent say IT is deploying more applications than a year ago.

Across the board, moving applications to the cloud presents the greatest challenge to IT, followed by virtualising the data centre, virtual desktop infrastructure (the biggest problem in the UK), supporting bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives and deploying software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

Rob Soderbery, general manager of the Cisco Enterprise Networking group said of the results: "More than ever, IT has the potential to make a profound impact on the business ... by building a network architecture that can leverage multiple technology transitions.

"The most successful IT professionals are those who acknowledge that fast decision-making within the enterprise is directly tied to the readiness of the network."