Legacy infrastructure holding back businesses

Top management, services and outsourcing company Accenture is warning that many businesses in Britain are struggling to achieve any benefits from agile IT because of their reliance on legacy systems.

Despite access to fresh agile infrastructure, over a quarter of businesses surveyed by Accenture are unable to reap the benefits because of their reliance on legacy systems.

Accenture conducted a straw poll of 500 tech and business execs in the UK who have to manage revenues and costs in their organisations. A majority – at 75 percent – agreed that scalable Agile IT helped reduce costs and bring products and services to the table by taking advantage of variable resources, quickly.

But a third complained that they were being held back by current infrastructure. Of that third they recognised that shifting to the cloud is a “great” move for IT productivity.

Almost all of the organisations surveyed admitted that there was no fully developed application retirement roadmap in place for moving on to agile IT.

Firms who are planning a deployment largely agreed on the main drivers for business. 55 percent of those surveyed said transforming existing IT infrastructure and further investments would improve flexibility, while 52 percent believed that moving to scalable IT would align their organisations with actual business needs.

50 percent of those surveyed believe that changing fixed IT would increase worker productivity, and 52 percent thought better IT engagement would be a reason to make the shift. 52 percent said that cutting costs was a priority, and scalable infrastructure would impact positively on IT spending.