Cloud-native application development and management is growing in picking up pace but will evolve to embrace edge computing, private clouds, and on-premises environments, not just the public cloud. Everyone’s efforts in this space need to support that reality.

Security falling short of growth ambitions

What the survey data shows us is that Australian businesses are hungry for top line growth in revenue and market share as we look towards 2024. They’ve battled the chaos of COVID-19, followed by high inflation, lingering staff shortages and a sluggish economy.

Profitability, cost management, innovation, and nurturing employees also feature strongly as business priorities. When it comes to technology, security is the No.1 priority, a side-effect of the recent series of large-scale data breaches which has served to remind every organisation how customer trust can literally be eroded overnight. It’s great to see security prioritised, and that goes beyond cybersecurity and networks to include physical assets and employee education.

But this year’s Annual Cloud Report shows a worrying lack of maturity across Australian organisations when it comes to security. Just 46 per cent of respondents had a cloud security policy in place, while just over a third (37 per cent) had an immutable offline backup strategy in place. While zero trust is now the predominant approach to security only 47 per cent of respondents believe their organisation has sufficient maturity to embrace it and only 37 per cent feel able to meet existing security standards.

Exploring generative AI

That’s a worry given the large fines that can now be imposed on Australian organisations deemed to have been negligent with customers’ data. While IT platform decisions and security occupy the attention of IT teams, they are also leveraging emerging technologies, including edge computing, Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G applications, in an effort to innovate.

Some 29 per cent of Australian respondents are using generative AI tools, though only 13 per cent use it extensively, a sign of the experimental phase the technology is currently in for most businesses but it is a figure that will rapidly change as the potential to power new products and improve productivity become more obvious.

Finally, for the first time this year, the research probed attitudes to sustainability in relation to cloud platforms and found that interest is high, but again, maturity is low. Just over a quarter (26 per cent) of Australian organisations said they had a dedicated sustainability team that included IT leadership and employees, and 32 per cent either had no sustainability strategy, only an ad-hoc plan or the IT department has “no involvement with sustainability efforts or decisions”.

As ESG (environmental and social governance) is baked into business strategies and investors favour businesses that can demonstrate progress on sustainability issues, the IT team will need to play an active role in ESG efforts.

The need for an ESG strategy

Some of the ESG activity being undertaken by the Australian organisations in the survey included adopting renewable energy, using automation to become more efficient, and decreasing their water usage which is great to see. But we’ve a long way to go to shift the needle on greenhouse gas emissions and no time to lose with significant cuts needed this decade.

Datacom’s latest Annual Cloud Report shows us that Australian businesses are looking to the future with optimism and a desire to innovate. Yes, there are challenges – budgets never get any bigger and finding skilled staff remains a headache. But after a tough few years, there’s a strong appetite to get the fundamentals right in IT and cloud platforms to help deliver better products and services, happier customers and more sustainable ways of doing business.

Research for the Annual Cloud Report is commissioned by Datacom and undertaken by Tech Research Asia – primary research was undertaken with business and IT leaders in 500 organisations across Australia and 200 organisations in New Zealand. The full report is available now Datacom’s Fourth Annual Cloud Report