Technical debt is hampering digital transformation efforts across EMEA, a new global report has discovered.

More than one in four (28%) of EMEA companies surveyed in Red Hat’s Global Customer Tech Trends report said that accumulated technical debt is the number one factor hindering their digital transformation.

The burden of technical debt has consistently been a top contender against digital transformation, as well as manual processes or IT operations (16%), and the seemingly perpetual skills and talent gap (24%).

Besides overall challenges and obstacles, the global survey of 700 IT leaders also asked about cloud proliferation and spending priorities for the coming year.

Cloud: On Premise On Top

When asking European IT managers about their cloud usage, of their own apps (i.e. not SaaS) around half (47%) are on premise, while two in five (40%) are in a hybrid cloud environment, and 12% are in the public cloud.

Respondents said they chose on-premise for the sake of data privacy and security, while cost benefit and technology preference are main reasons why EMEA-based respondents use public clouds.

Currently, most respondents have under 40% of their workloads containerised and there is an expected increase in the next 12 months.

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Efficiency and Security 

When it comes to allocating budge, the funding priorities for IT managers in EMEA is to manage the cloud (62%), consolidate the data centre (35%), and optimise cloud spend (32%).

In doing so, they hope to make the organisation both more secure and more efficient. When questioned on the desired outcomes for these funding priorities, almost half (43%) of EMEA IT managers say they are investing to obtain better security and data protection.

Another four in ten (42%) are hoping to achieve improved efficiencies.

Similarly, the top funding priorities for security were in alignment. Network security (36%) appears to be the top financial priority, followed by threat intelligence, detection and response (35%), and vulnerability management (30%).