‘Costly’ legacy IT blamed for sustainability setbacks

Almost two-thirds of IT leaders say their organisation’s legacy infrastructure is causing a “huge sustainability nightmare”, according to research from IT services provider Daisy.

The survey of 250 senior IT decision-makers found that legacy technology is contributing to almost 40% of an organisation’s overall power consumption.

While the large majority of the IT leaders (86%) claim that sustainability and energy efficiency is important in their firms, and 84% say IT efficiency targets are in place, only half are confident that their organisation will meet these targets.

“Sustainability is a vital component of any modern business, and IT departments have a growing role in helping the wider organisation achieve green targets,” says Andy Bevan, head of propositions and strategy consulting at Daisy.

“But legacy technology is a cause for concern amongst IT teams, with aging equipment still contributing to significantly to power consumption.”

To tackle this, Daisy recommends adopting a “modern hybrid cloud platform, [that] can help bridge the gap between on-site infrastructure and cloud to deliver performance and sustainability benefits.”

Legacy infrastructure is also proving costly to firms, the survey finds, with almost a third of budgets being used to support, maintain, and manage inefficient legacy hardware.

With this, almost 70% of survey respondents said that they were feeling “significant” pressure to reduce spending.

“Over the last few years it has been a tough operating environment for many organisations. Driving efficiencies is a big part of businesses’ survival strategies today, which is having a huge impact on IT teams,” adds Bevan.

As a result, IT leaders are looking to artificial intelligence (82%) to help with their operations in future to cut costs, or more specifically, ‘AIOps’.

“In 2024, we’ll see a rapid sophistication of AIOps, the process of using big data and machine learning to automate IT operations” claimed Sean Scott, chief product development officer of PagerDuty in TI’s 2024 technical AI predictions. “With more efficient AIOps, enterprises of all kinds will have access to scalable automation.”