CIO Pulse: 2023 Budgets and Priorities, a survey undertaken by SoftwareOne to recognise the spend and priorities of 600 IT leaders, has underscored the post-pandemic reality of rushed, unoptimised cloud migration, with consequent technical debt representing a significant pain point for CIOs in 2023.

Technical debt is the price companies pay for short-term delivery of projects at the cost of long-term value, and, in this instance, hinders CIOs’ attempts of furthering operational efficiency and productivity.

Specifically, CIO Pulse found that 55% of respondents are dealing with knock-on issues prompted by a lack of preparation when moving to the cloud; 38% are dealing with issues caused by a rushed migration to the cloud; and 17% say they moved applications and services to the cloud without full budget planning.

Additionally, almost a third (31%) of respondents said they’re not receiving the desired results from cloud because workloads weren’t optimised before migration.

Only around a quarter (27%) of IT leaders confirmed that the value they expected from their cloud investment has been greatly exceeded, with rushed implementations and flawed service configuration directly impacting long-term value for organisations.

This technical debt — combined with cloud’s rising costs, and economic volatility — means that even with increased IT budgets going forward, budgets will likely need to be stretched. While 93% of CIOs expect IT budgets to increase in 2023, 83% believe they’ll need to achieve more with less.

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Technical debt aside, the report also highlighted firms’ current priorities as CIOs continue to leverage cloud services for delivering successful digital transformation within their organisations.

This includes driving better cost-efficiency by modernising existing cloud implementations, and reducing costs associated with on-prem infrastructure by migrating key applications to the cloud.

According to the findings, one in four IT leaders seek to migrate critical workloads to the cloud, pointing to rapid increases in workload that exceed capacity (40%) and continued transformation (40%).

Further, 40% of respondents said that continued cloud migration is pivotal for reducing IT costs in the next 12 months, with 39% believing that pivoting to native cloud services would help them in driving down licensing costs.