Red Hat Survey: AI is a Driving Force Behind UK Cloud Strategy as well as the Top Skills Gap

LONDON – 8th October 2024 – Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced new survey results highlighting key drivers for cloud strategies over the next 18 months. Preparing for AI adoption was cited as a priority for 88% of UK respondents, almost level with cloud-native application development and DevOps (89%) and evolving cloud strategy in line with business objectives (89%).

98% of UK IT managers see advantages in adopting enterprise open source solutions for AI, including predictive and generative. Accelerating innovation is seen as the top benefit of enterprise open source AI in the UK (53%), with cost-efficiency coming in second place (50%).

The research surveyed 609 IT managers from large businesses (500+ employees) across six countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UAE and the UK. It explores the priorities and challenges for IT managers as they navigate cloud complexity and the opportunities and barriers they face in executing AI strategies.

Key UK-specific findings include:

• Almost all UK IT managers surveyed (98%) consider cloud technology investment a priority for 2025. 28% are planning a strong focus on innovation and new technologies, while 61% expect balanced growth between new technologies and enhancements to existing systems. Of this subset of respondents, over half (53%) plan to increase their investment by 21-50%.
• 81% of UK respondents agree that there is an urgent skills gap in the area of AI – including data science, large language model (LLM) and generative AI – making it the top ranked skills gap. This number is up from 72% in 2023. Other urgent gaps include cybersecurity (75%), and strategic thinking and ability to tackle business-level issues (68%).
• When asked about the advantages in adopting enterprise open source solutions for AI – including predictive and generative – more than half of UK IT managers surveyed (53%) cited accelerated innovation, alongside cost-efficiency (50%), and trust and transparency (43%).
• When determining their trust in an enterprise model for generative AI, UK IT managers deem having transparent, modifiable models with explainable sources the most important factor (95%).

Cloud is an investment priority

IT managers surveyed across the six countries describe their organisation’s planned approach to investing in cloud technology by 2025:

• Half (50%) are taking a balanced approach, focusing equally on new technologies and enhancements to existing systems
• 26% have a strong focus on innovation and new technologies
• 14% are focused on essential services only

Across the six countries, respondents were asked about priority areas for their organisation's cloud strategy for the next 18 months. The following came top:

• Centralising cloud management (80%)
• Security, compliance and sovereignty regulatory requirements (78%)
• Preparing for AI adoption (77%)
• Evolving cloud strategy in line with business objectives (76%)

Siloed teams are slowing cloud adoption

96% of IT managers surveyed said siloed teams pose challenges when adopting cloud technologies, with 53% encountering this issue frequently.

Among those affected, the most common impacts on cloud strategy are:

• Inconsistent security and compliance across different providers (cited by 54%)
• Increased costs (47%)
• Limited control and visibility over cloud resources (42%)

Readiness for AI

When asked about their ability to take advantage of the growing AI opportunity, 40% of IT managers surveyed state that their organisation has scalable, flexible and accessible IT platforms but lacks the right skill sets to fully harness AI’s potential. This compares to 25% that have the right platforms and feel well-positioned to get the best value from them, and 35% who are in need of new platforms (22% of which are on a path to acquire these).

With generative AI increasingly being explored by enterprises looking to solve existing problems or seize new opportunities, the survey looked into the importance of a range of factors in determining trust in an enterprise model for generative AI. It found that the following all placed similarly among respondents:

• Transparent, modifiable models with explainable sources (cited by 89%)
• Proven performance and reliability in similar use cases (85%)
• Protection with model indemnification (84%)
• Compliance with data privacy and security standards (83%)
• Accessible for use across teams, not just data scientists (83%)
• Cost-effectiveness (82%)
• Domain-specific models (as opposed to generic LLMs) (79%)

The survey asked for the main obstacles preventing CTOs or equivalent decision makers from advancing generative AI initiatives. The top listed were:

• Concerns about data privacy and security (43%)
• Energy consumption / sustainability concerns (39%)
• Insufficient infrastructure or resources (32%)
• Lack of transparency in AI models (31%) 

Supporting Quotes

Hans Roth, Senior Vice President & General Manager EMEA, Red Hat 

“Cloud technology continues to unlock significant advantages in scalability, cost efficiency and faster time to market. Yet, this adoption can also drive increased complexity, with many organisations finding themselves slowed down by internal silos, as shown in this latest survey. With the increasing prominence of AI in cloud strategies, we see from this survey that both IT managers and CTOs care about transparency when it comes to AI models: we believe that an open source approach can bring the transparency, modifiability and explainability needed for enterprise-ready generative AI.”

Jo Hodgson, Country manager, UK, Red Hat

“We see a strong desire from UK businesses to innovate with cloud technologies to stay competitive, while needing to respond to cost pressures and find efficiencies. AI has the potential to help address a range of business demands, and we believe an AI-centric future requires greater choice, flexibility and independence across clouds. This in turn requires a higher level of collaboration by design so that organisations can work across diverse tools, vendors and clouds to prepare for whatever comes next. The beauty of taking an open source approach to AI is that organisations don’t have to risk rapid innovation alone: they can navigate the unpredictability alongside 70 million contributors, and with Red Hat, the confidence that their innovation is backed by enterprise support.”

Methodology

The research referenced in this press release was conducted by international market research consultancy Censuswide, among a sample of 609 IT Managers aged 18+ in Large Businesses (500+ Employees). The survey ran across the UK, French, German, Italian, Spanish and UAE markets, with at least 100 respondents from each market. The data was collected between 15th-23rd of August 2024. Censuswide abides by and employs members of the Market Research Society and follows the MRS code of conduct which is based on the ESOMAR principles.

For this press release, percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number.

Definitions used in the survey:

Cloud management: the control and orchestration of products and services that operate in a cloud environment (public cloud, private cloud, hybrid and multicloud), including processes, strategies, policies and technology

Cloud strategy: the use of cloud infrastructure to run applications, including private cloud, public cloud, and the use of cloud-native technology such as containers to develop software.

IT platform: An operating system, infrastructure or application platform for developing and scaling applications, including AI apps, consistently across datacentre, cloud and multiple public clouds 

Enterprise open source software: open source software that is supported by a vendor, usually via a subscription fee. For example, the vendor stabilises and quality-assures the software, certifies it works with an ecosystem of hardware and software, secures it and provides technical support.