It is no surprise that security remains a top funding priority for IT leaders but according to Red Hat‘s 2024 Global Tech Trends Report, security has become even more important than it was in previous years. The report explores the current state of cloud and organizations’ cloud strategies, their major funding priorities, and the factors influencing digital transformation success.

This year, 50% of survey respondents said security was one of their top three funding priorities, increasing 5 points from last year, which is much larger than most changes seen from one survey to the next.

Modernizing existing applications is the top application development funding priority at 45% with improving digital user experience, building cloud-native applications, and accelerating application and service delivery being other top priorities. However, application development funding priorities varied across regions – while the Americas and EMEA have a fairly similar rank ordering of application development funding priorities, the APAC region is both more varied and places application modernization fairly far down its list of application development funding priorities.

The large bucket of cloud management, which includes various forms of hybrid and multicloud management, remained the highest IT management funding priority by far this year. 59% of respondents identified cloud management as a top 3 priority, increasing 9 points from just 2 years ago. Hybrid cloud environments proved to be the norm, with companies generally being neither private cloud-first (21%) nor standardizing on a single public cloud (9%), and a hybrid approach requires thoughtful, strategic management to be successful.

The barriers to digital transformation success have remained relatively consistent over the past couple of years, with manual processes or IT operations, technical debt, and skillset or talent gaps identified as the top areas hindering organizations; however, manual processes was more often cited as a barrier in the Americas and less frequently in EMEA. With automation being such a prominent topic across many areas of IT, it’s no shock that companies are beginning to automate in many areas with security automation, cloud services automation, and service delivery automation at the front of line when it comes to funding. Notably, lack of funding and cost reduction mandates remain near the bottom of the list, economic uncertainties and tighter budgets notwithstanding.