Red Hat’s 2024 Global Tech Trends report, based on a survey of 706 IT leaders, reveals significant insights into the evolving landscape of cloud infrastructure utilization and IT management priorities. Organizations are increasingly finding equilibrium in balancing public and private cloud infrastructures, leading to a notable shift in IT management funding priorities compared to previous years.

Workload migration management, once a top concern, has seen a nine-point decline in importance, indicating a stabilization as organizations determine optimal application environments. Red Hat suggests this reflects a settling of preferences regarding application deployment locations, with neither widespread repatriation from public clouds nor wholesale datacenter shutdowns being typical strategies.

In the EMEA region, the study highlights diverse approaches to application deployment: 10% favor public cloud, 40% employ hybrid models, while 47% rely on on-premise IT infrastructure. The decision-making process behind infrastructure choice often revolves around data considerations such as sovereignty, privacy, and security, particularly influencing on-premise deployments.

While cost efficiency remains a significant factor for both on-premise and cloud infrastructures, the agility offered by hybrid clouds emerges as a priority for IT leaders, with 41% citing it as a key driver. Interestingly, modernization takes precedence in application development strategies across regions, overshadowing emerging technologies like AI/ML applications and secure coding practices/tools.

Despite the consistent barriers to digital transformation—manual processes, technical debt, and talent gaps—organizations are increasingly turning to automation solutions, particularly in security, cloud services, and service delivery, to streamline operations and address these challenges.

In EMEA, cloud management takes the lion’s share of IT budgets (62%), followed by datacenter consolidation (35%) and optimizing cloud spending (32%), reflecting a strategic focus on enhancing cloud infrastructure efficiency and management.

Ultimately, the overarching goal for IT leaders remains twofold: bolstering organizational security and efficiency. Nearly half of EMEA IT managers prioritize investments aimed at improving security and data protection (43%), while another substantial portion (42%) seeks to drive operational efficiencies.