“Global IT Organisations Unprepared for Competitive Cyber Threats”

Oracle has announced the results of its recent ‘Oracle Cloud Agility’ study, which revealed that businesses worldwide overestimate their agility, and are not fully prepared for global competitive cyber threats.

While a majority of businesses believe they are agile, Oracle’s research highlights that many organisations cannot flexibly manage workloads or rapidly develop, test, and launch new applications, leaving them poorly prepared to deal with competitive threats. The study also found a lack of awareness among businesses around how technology, like Platform-as-aService (PaaS), can be used to help address these challenges.

The Oracle Cloud Agility study surveyed 2,263 employees working for large global enterprises to understand business agility in the age of cloud.

The results show that 64 per cent consider their organisation to be agile, in the areas of being able to adjust quickly to new business opportunities or to iterate new products and services quickly.

When looking at the United States, businesses are even more positive, with 66 per cent believing their business to be agile, the report said.

Respondents are clear about the benefits of agility, with 81 per cent stating that the ability to rapidly develop, test, and launch new business applications is either critically important or important to the success of their business, falling to 76 per cent in the United States.

In particular, nearly onethird of respondents, about 29 per cent believe the effective mobilisation of applications and services is the most important factor in business success today when it comes to Information Technology (IT) infrastructure.

The study also showed that the impact of agility on competitiveness is critically important to businesses.

According to the study, “In fact, the ability of competitors to launch innovative customer services more rapidly was identified as the top threat by businesses (27 percent).

Fifty two percent of global respondents indicated that their business does not have an IT infrastructure capable of meeting competitive threats. Those surveyed in the United States aligned exactly with their global counterparts, as 52 per cent noted that their IT infrastructure was insufficient to meet competitive threats.”