Analyst firm 451 Research Inc. has dug up some interesting tidbits about how enterprises are embracing emerging technologies in its inaugural Voice of the Enterprise Digital Pulse survey released late last week.

The finding with the biggest potential implications is that 60 percent of enterprises say they’ll be running the majority of their information technology in the cloud by 2019, instead of in on-premises data centers. Most of these workloads are being shifted to the public cloud and software-as-a-service providers, the survey found.

With such plans afoot, it’s no surprise to find that the biggest spending increase for IT budgets relates to products delivered “as a service” at the expense of on-premises installations. The research firm also found that information security remains a big concern, with 16 percent of organizations dedicating their biggest budget increase to the space.

As for enterprises’ main initiatives heading into 2018, the focus is on working out how to tap into data and exploit it to achieve business goals. Some 45 percent of enterprises said business intelligence was their main initiative for this year, followed by 29 percent that cited machine learning and artificial intelligence. Just behind, 28 percent of enterprises said “big data” was their main concern this year.

About a quarter of enterprises said they were looking at building software-defined networks, while another 20 percent said the main focus was on software containers and software that can manage them. Serveless computing was cited as another area of focus.

It could well be that this interest is being sparked by a desire to catch up with early adopters. That’s because the survey found that most enterprises are still sounding out these kinds of emerging technologies. For example, just 12 percent of 1,000 IT professionals worldwide that were surveyed said their organizations are currently using machine learning and AI today. The numbers using other buzzword technologies were even lower. For example, just 7 percent of organizations said they are already using blockchain.

“The survey suggests that many – but certainly not all – organizations are finally reaching the point where they can focus on endeavors that help differentiate the business, instead of merely keeping the lights on,” said Melanie Posey, research vice president and general manager of Voice of the Enterprise at 451 Research. “In 2018 we expect to see much of this effort focused around a new set of approaches to data optimization and analysis.”

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