Keeping systems patched and secure is one of the biggest ongoing challenges faced by IT. Tasks can be tedious and error prone, and extremely difficult to manage in large-scale cloud environments. With Autonomous Linux, customers can rely on autonomous capabilities to help ensure their systems are secure and highly available to help prevent cyberattacks.

Along with the new autonomous OS, the company introduced Oracle OS Management Service, a highly available Oracle Cloud Infrastructure component that delivers control and visibility over systems whether they run Autonomous Linux, Linux, or Windows.

Combined with resource governance policies, OS Management Service, via the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure console or APIs, also enables users to automate capabilities that will execute common management tasks for Linux systems, including patch and package management, security and compliance reporting, and configuration management. It can be further automated with other Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services like auto-scaling as workloads need to grow or shrink to meet elastic demand.

The nes OS, in conjunction with Oracle OS Management Service, uses advanced machine learning and autonomous capabilities to deliver unprecedented cost savings, security, and availability and frees up critical IT resources to tackle more strategic initiatives.

• Eliminate manual OS management—World’s first autonomous operating system in the cloud to deliver automated patching, updates, and tuning without human intervention. Based on a preconfigured Oracle Linux image; automated daily package updates; enhanced OS parameter tuning and OS diagnostics gathering.
• Deliver automatic, in-depth protection at all levels—100 percent hands-off automatic security updates daily to the Linux kernel and key user space libraries. This requires no downtime along with protection from both external attacks and malicious internal users. Known Exploit Detection provides automated alerts if anyone attempts to exploit a vulnerability that has been patched by Oracle.
• Provide always-on availability—Includes automated patching and upgrades while the system is running, eliminating unnecessary downtime for users and the system.

Oracle Autonomous Linux and Oracle OS Management Services are included with Oracle Premier Support at no extra charge with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compute services. The company claims that, combined with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s other cost advantages, most Linux workload customers can expect to have 30-50 percent TCO savings versus both on-premise and other cloud vendors over five years.

“Adding autonomous capabilities to the operating system layer, with future plans to expand beyond infrastructure software, goes straight after the OpEx challenges nearly all customers face today,” said Al Gillen, Group VP, Software Development and Open Source, IDC. “This capability effectively turns Oracle Linux into a service, freeing customers to focus their IT resources on application and user experience, where they can deliver true competitive differentiation.”

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The study, which includes input from more than 5,670 global executives in 48 countries, points to compounding challenges that require a fundamental shift in how companies meet and manage changing workforce needs throughout all levels of the enterprise.

According to the global research, the time it takes to close a skills gap through training has increased by more than 10 times in just four years. In 2014, it took three days on average to close a capability gap through training in the enterprise; in 2018, it took 36 days.

The study showed that new skills requirements are rapidly emerging, while other skills are becoming obsolete. In 2016, executives ranked technical core capabilities for STEM and basic computer and software/application skills as the top two most critical skills for employees. In 2018, the top two skills sought were behavioural skills – willingness to be flexible, agile, and adaptable to change and time management skills and ability to prioritise.

In contrast, according to an IBM poll conducted by Morning Consult, ethics and integrity was the skill often named most critical in a survey of consumers in US cities including Atlanta, Austin, Baton Rouge, Boston, Chicago, Raleigh, and San Francisco.

“Organisations are facing mounting concerns over the widening skills gap and tightened labor markets with the potential to impact their futures as well as worldwide economies,” said Amy Wright, managing partner, IBM Talent & Transformation at IBM.

“Yet while executives recognise severity of the problem, half of those surveyed admit that they do not have any skills development strategies in place to address their largest gaps. And the tactics the study found were most likely to close the skills gap the fastest are the tactics companies are using the least. New strategies are emerging to help companies re-skill their people and build the culture of continuous learning required to succeed in the era of AI.”

Recommendations

The core recommendation is to take a holistic approach to closing the skills gap that is focused on re-skilling our workforce through development that’s multi-modal, personalised to the individual and built on data. This means creating educational journeys for employees that are personalised to their current experience level, skills, job role and career aspirations. To fuel those journeys, companies should take advantage of an ecosystem of partners to expand their access to content, leverage innovative learning technologies, and even share skilled talent across organisational boundaries.

Also, the research shows those journeys should be delivered through experiential learning that come to life in new ways of working, including peer-to-peer learning through agile teams with heterogenous skill sets, hands-on practice served up in the flow of work, and traditional classroom as well as online learning.

The research also shows that companies should use analytics and AI to predict and infer what skills are available throughout the organisation and transparently share that information with employees to drive a culture of continuous learning. IBM is applying this strategy inside its own walls and regularly providing its own workforce with insight into the most critical skills.

IBM is applying end to end AI capabilities for every aspect of the employee lifecycle to help clients foster talent, empower their people and transform their business for the era of AI and automation. These services help enable companies to close the skills gap brought on by these new technologies, help their employees make the shift to partnering with intelligent machines, and address bias in the recruiting and hiring process.

True culture change is now driven by new skills and expertise in business created by the advent of intelligent workflows demanding new ways of working in every industry. Business leaders must create dynamic and flexible organisations and teams to enable the ongoing reinvention of work and skills.

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Government agencies are moving rapidly to adopt cloud-office platforms because of the desire to consolidate collaboration environments, reduce costs, redeploy IT staff, drive simplicity and provide more functionality to users more quickly. Because of these cloud applications, the introduction of AI, mobile collaboration, collaborative content authoring and workstream collaboration are becoming part of the mainstream fast.

Cloud services especially designed for government will have a transformational business impact in less than two years, says Gartner. “Government agencies acknowledge that public cloud is secure, and some are even making plans to adopt public cloud across protected, secret domains. But the majority remain in private clouds,” said Neville Cannon, senior research director at Gartner. “In addition, more countries continue to adopt cloud-first policies — Brazil and Colombia are the latest, while Kuwait is currently developing its own.”

DGTPs

Digital government technology platforms (DGTPs) will have a transformational impact on businesses in the next two to five years. “Digital technology platforms are emerging across government agencies as they allow governments to retire legacy systems and infrastructure and therefore achieve greater economies of scale,” said Alia Mendonsa, senior research director at Gartner. “They also provide secure, automated citizen-centric digital government services for all types of services such as appointments, payments and eligibility for benefits.”

Gartner analysts said that DGTPs will continue penetration across governments as they offer enterprise solutions that support development of sustainable and scalable digital government services. Current examples include the Australian Government’s Digital Marketplace, where government agencies can do business with sellers of digital services, and The State of Ohio’s InnovateOhio platform, which provides services and capabilities that enable state agencies to become more customer-centric and data-driven.

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The report examined the longtail financial impact of a data breach, finding that the effects of a data breach are felt for years. While an average of 67 percent of data breach costs were realised within the first year after a breach, 22 percent accrued in the second year and another 11 percent accumulated more than two years after a breach. The longtail costs were higher in the second and third years for organisations in highly-regulated environments, such as healthcare, financial services, energy and pharmaceuticals.

Some of the most significant findings are:

• Malicious breaches – most common, most expensive: over 50 percent of data breaches in the study resulted from malicious cyberattacks and cost companies 1 million USD more on average than those originating from accidental causes.
• “Mega breaches” lead to mega losses: while less common, breaches of more than 1 million records cost companies a projected 42 million USD in losses; and those of 50 million records are projected to cost companies 388 million.
• Practice makes perfect: companies with an incident response team that also extensively tested their incident response plan experienced 1.23 million USD less in data breach costs on average than those that had neither measure in place.
• US breaches cost double: the average cost of a breach in the US is 8.19 million USD, more than double the worldwide average.
• Healthcare breaches cost the most: For the 9th year in a row, healthcare organisations had the highest cost of a breach – nearly 6.5 million USD on average (over 60 percent more than other industries in the study).

The study found that data breaches which originated from a malicious cyberattack were not only the most common root cause of a breach, but also the most expensive. Malicious data breaches cost companies in the study 4.45 million USD on average – over 1 million more than those originating from accidental causes such as system glitch and human error. These breaches are a growing threat, as the percentage of malicious or criminal attacks as the root cause of data breaches in the report crept up from 42 percent to 51 percent over the past six years of the study (a 21 percent increase).

Inadvertent breaches from human error and system glitches however were still the cause for nearly half of the data breaches in the report, costing companies 3.50 and 3.24 million USD respectively. These breaches from human and machine error represent an opportunity for improvement, which can be addressed through security awareness training for staff, technology investments, and testing services to identify accidental breaches early on. One particular area of concern is the misconfiguration of cloud servers, which contributed to the exposure of 990 million records in 2018, representing 43 percent of all lost records for the year.

Breach response biggest cost saver

For the past 14 years, the Ponemon Institute has examined factors that increase or reduce the cost of a breach and has found that the speed and efficiency at which a company responds to a breach has a significant impact on the overall cost.

This year’s report found that the average lifecycle of a breach was 279 days with companies taking 206 days to first identify a breach after it occurs and an additional 73 days to contain the breach. However, companies in the study who were able to detect and contain a breach in less than 200 days spent 1.2 million USD less on the total cost of a breach.

A focus on incident response can help reduce the time it takes companies to respond, and the study found that these measures also had a direct correlation with overall costs. Having an incident response team in place and extensive testing of incident response plans were two of the top three greatest cost saving factors examined in the study. Companies that had both of these measures in place had 1.23 million USD less total costs for a data breach on average than those that had neither measure in place (3.51 million vs. 4.74 million USD).

Additional factors impacting the cost of a breach for companies in the study included:

• Number of compromised records: Data breaches cost companies around $150 per record that was lost or stolen.
• Companies that fully deployed security automation technologies experienced around half the cost of a breach (2.65 million USD average) compared to those that did not have these technologies deployed (5.16 million average).
• Extensive use of encryption was also a top cost saving factor, reducing the total cost of a breach by 360,000 USD.
• Breaches originating from a third party – such as a partner or supplier – cost companies 370,000 USD more than average, emphasizing the need for companies to closely vet the security of the companies they do business with, align security standards, and actively monitor third-party access.

Regional and industry trends

The study also examined the cost of data breaches in different industries and regions, finding that data breaches in the US are vastly more expensive – costing 8.19 million USD, or more than double the average for worldwide companies in the study. Costs for data breaches in the US increased by 130 percent over the past 14 years of the study; up from 3.54 million USD in the 2006 study.

Additionally, organisations in the Middle East reported the highest average number of breached records with nearly 40,000 breached records per incident (compared to global average of around 25,500.)

For the 9th year in a row, healthcare organisations in the study had the highest costs associated with data breaches. The average cost of a breach in the healthcare industry was nearly 6.5 million USD – over 60 percent higher than the cross-industry average.

About the research

The research was based on in-depth interviews with more than 500 companies around the world that suffered a breach over the past year. The analysis takes into account hundreds of cost factors including legal, regulatory and technical activities to loss of brand equity, customers, and employee productivity.

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“Despite strong growth across the board, the cloud market’s consolidation favours the large and dominant providers, with smaller and niche providers losing share,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “This is an indication that scalability matters when it comes to the public cloud IaaS business. Only those providers who invest capital expenditure in building out data centers at scale across multiple regions will succeed and continue to capture market share. Offering rich feature functionality across the cloud technology stack will be the ticket to success, as well.”

In 2018, the top five IaaS providers accounted for nearly 77 percent of the global IaaS market, up from less than 73 percent in 2017. Market consolidation will continue through 2019, driven by the high rate of growth for the top providers, which experienced aggregate growth of 39 percent from 2017 to 2018 compared with the more modest growth of 11 percent for all other providers during the same period. “Consolidation will occur as organisations and developers look for standardised, broadly supported platforms for developing and hosting cloud applications,” said Mr. Nag.

Amazon continued to lead the worldwide IaaS market with an estimated 15.5 billion of revenue in 2018, up 27 percent from 2017 (see table). The largest of the IaaS providers, Amazon accounts for nearly half of the total IaaS market. It continues to aggressively expand into new IT markets via new services, as well as acquisitions, growing its core cloud business.

Worldwide IaaS public cloud services market share 2017-18. Source: Gartner (July 2019)

Microsoft secured the second position in the IaaS market with revenue surpassing 5 billion in 2018, up from 3.1 billion in 2017. Microsoft delivers its IaaS capabilities through its innovative and open Azure offering, which continues to solidify its position as a leading IaaS provider.

The dominant IaaS provider in China, Alibaba Cloud, experienced the strongest growth among the leading vendors, growing 92.6 percent in 2018. The company has built an ecosystem consisting of managed service providers (MSPs) and independent software vendors (ISVs). Its success last year was driven by aggressive R&D investment in its portfolio of offerings, especially compared with its hyperscale provider counterparts. Alibaba has the financial capability to continue this trend and invest in global expansion.

Google came in at the number 4 spot, growing 60.2 percent in revenue from 2017. “Google’s cloud offering is something to keep an eye on with its new leadership focus on customers and shift toward becoming a more enterprise-geared offering,” said Mr. Nag.

“As the cloud business continues to gather momentum and hyperscale cloud providers consolidate the market, product managers at cloud MSPs must look at other ways to differentiate, such as focusing on vertical industries and getting certified in the hyperscale cloud provider partner programs in order to drive revenue,” said Nag.

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“According to inquiries with Gartner clients, organisations are developing and deploying new applications in the cloud and moving existing assets at an increasing rate, and we believe this will continue to increase,” said Donald Feinberg, distinguished research vice president at Gartner. “We also believe this begins with systems for data management solutions for analytics (DMSA) use cases — such as data warehousing, data lakes and other use cases where data is used for analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Increasingly, operational systems are also moving to the cloud, especially with conversion to the SaaS application model.”

Gartner research shows that 2018 worldwide database management system (DBMS) revenue grew 18.4 percent to 46 billion dollar. Cloud DBMS revenue accounts for 68 percent of that 18.4 percent growth — and Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) account for 75.5 percent of the total market growth. This trend reinforces that cloud service provider (CSP) infrastructures and the services that run on them are becoming the new data management platform.

Ecosystems are forming around CSPs that both integrate services within a single CSP and provide early steps toward intercloud data management. This is in distinct contrast to the on-premises approach, where individual products often serve multiple roles but rarely offer their own built-in capabilities to support integration with adjacent products within the on-premises deployment environment. While there is some growth in on-premises systems, this growth is rarely from new on-premises deployments; it is generally due to price increases and forced upgrades undertaken to avoid risk.

“Ultimately what this shows is that the prominence of the CSP infrastructure, its native offerings, and the third-party offerings that run on them is assured,” said Mr. Feinberg. “A recent Gartner cloud adoption survey showed that of those on the public cloud, 81 percent were using more than one CSP. The cloud ecosystem is expanding beyond the scope of a single CSP — to multiple CSPs — for most cloud consumers.”

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In the report, 110 senior executives in risk, audit, finance and compliance at large global organisations identified cloud computing as the top concern for the second consecutive quarter. Additional information security risks, such as cybersecurity disclosure and GDPR compliance, ranked among the top five concerns of the executives surveyed.The top two fast-moving, high-impact risks — those which have the ability to cripple an organisation quickly — are also related to information security threats.

Social engineering and GDPR compliance were cited as most likely to cause the greatest enterprise damage if not adequately addressed by risk management leaders. However, only 18 percent of the cross-functional executives surveyed currently considered social engineering to be a significant enterprise risk.

Executives should expect cybersecurity threats to affect organisations in unpredictable ways. Through 2022, at least 95 percent of cloud security failures will be the fault of the organisation. As more sophisticated tactics such as social engineering are engineered to compromise sensitive data, organisations should expand their cybersecurity team to address evolving digital risks.

Matthew Shinkman, practice leader at Gartner, said, “Executives are right to expand cloud services as part of their digital business initiatives, but they need to ensure their cloud security strategy keeps up with this growth. Leaders should start by clearly identifying their most at-risk areas, which remain obscure to many large organisation leaders.”

New risks

Gartner forecasts cloud computing to be a 300 billion dollar business by 2021, as companies increasingly adopt cloud services to realise their desired digital business outcomes. Through the use of cloud services, cloud computing provides the speed and agility that digital business requires. Adopting the cloud can also result in significant cost savings and generate new sources of revenue.

Results from Gartner’s Emerging Risks Report, however, reveal that companies continue to struggle with security. Despite record spending on information security in the last two years, organisations have lost an estimated 400 billion USD to cyber theft and fraud worldwide. As cybersecurity events and data breaches increase, it is imperative that organisations elevate IT security to a board-level topic and an essential part of any solid digital business growth strategy.

“Executives should promote risk awareness throughout the organisation,” Mr. Shinkman stated. “A strong risk culture helps employees make the right decisions and mitigates poor outcomes.”

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“The top four providers have strong IaaS offerings and saw healthy growth as IaaS adoption is being fully embraced by mainstream organisations and as cloud availability expands into new regions and countries,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner. “Cloud-directed IT spending now constitutes more than 20 percent of the total IT budget for organizations using cloud. Many of these organisations are now using cloud to support production environments and business-critical operations.”

In the IaaS market, the competitive landscape is consolidating around the leaders. The top four providers are all hyperscale IaaS providers and represent almost 75 percent of the total IaaS market and 47 percent of the combined IaaS and infrastructure utility services (IUS) market.

Amazon is the clear leader with an estimated 12.2 billion revenue in 2017, up 25 percent from 2016 (see table). The largest of the IaaS providers, Amazon is also the most mature, enterprise-reay provider, with the strongest track record of customer success and the most useful partner ecosystem. Growth in 2017 was driven not only by customers that are migrating from traditional data centers to cloud IaaS, but also by customers implementing transformational digital business projects, reflecting its broad range of use cases.

Worldwide IaaS public cloud services market share, 2016-2017 (millions of USD).
Source: Gartner, August 2018

Note: In 2018 Gartner adjusted its categorisation of market share data. This resulted in a more accurate statement of the 2016 IaaS numbers and shows a natural flattening of share distribution.

Microsoft secured the No. 2 position in the IaaS market with growth of more than 98 percent on its IaaS offering, with revenue surpassing 3.1 billion in 2017. Microsoft delivers its IaaS capabilities through its Microsoft Azure offering, which is a collection of infrastructure and platform services.

In the third spot, Alibaba’s 2017 growth of 63 percent reflects the company’s successful investment in research and development (R&D). Alibaba has the financial capability to continue this trend and invest in global expansion, giving the company potential to become over time an alternative to the global hyperscale cloud providers in select regions.

“This reflects a fundamental change in what and how organisations are consuming technology. Some legacy infrastructure offerings, such as IUS, are seeing lower and slower uptake that impacts the combined IaaS and IUS market,” Mr. Nag said. “Additionally, a groundswell of demand for cloud-skilled personnel is forcing technology providers to change how they compete to meet this exploding demand.”

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The report reveals that while companies are making progress on evolving their customer experience, they are struggling to transform their back-end operations. Furthermore, businesses are failing to create the strong digital culture needed to bring their employees into their digital transformation agendas.

The study compares digital transformation progress against a 2012 report from Capgemini Consulting and MIT Sloan’s.

The new research shows that despite huge investments in digital transformation initiatives, set to exceed 2 trillion dollar by 2021 (IDC, December 2017), organisations today feel less equipped with the right leadership capabilities than they were six years ago (45% in 2012 compared to 35% in 2018), while less than half still feel they have the right digital capabilities to advance their transformations (39% in both 2012 and 2018.)

CX is improving, excellence in operations is still lacking

When it comes to digital capabilities, organisations have prioritised customer experience – making the most progress in this sphere. For example, 43 percent of organisations today are using mobile channels to sell products and services, compared to 23 percent in 2012.

Moreover, nearly 40 percent are improving their knowledge of markets and customers through devices embedded in products, compared to 17 percent in 2012. These gains are not surprising given the widespread use of mobile channels and apps among consumers, and advancements in IoT technologies.

However, only 36 percent of organisations said that operations was an area they excelled in. Operations comprise aspects such as digital design of products and services, the ability to adapt operational processes quickly, real-time monitoring, and the ability of employees to share knowledge, collaborate digitally and perform their work from any location.

While there were small gains from 2012 to 2018 in the percentage of organisations that design their products digitally (38% to 40%), only 35 percent are monitoring operations in real-time (48% in 2012), only 29 percent modify their operational processes to quickly adapt to external challenges (34% in 2012), and many organisations are not providing the tools and capabilities that their employees might expect.

For example, only 38 percent of organisations say that their employees can collaborate digitally with other employees and just 33 percent of organisations agree that digital technologies improve communication between senior executives and employees (compared to 70% and 62% in 2012, respectively).

IT and business relationships show decline

While the relationship between the CIO and other members of the leadership team is critical in a digital age, there appears to be a disconnect here. In 2012, 65 percent of organisations felt that the CIO and senior business executives had a shared understanding of the role of IT in their organisation, but this has declined to 37 percent in 2018.

While 59 percent of respondents in 2012 felt that the CIO and senior business executives have a shared understanding of how IT can be used to increase productivity of the organisation’s operations, this has declined to 35 percent in 2018.

Six years ago, 53 percent of respondents agreed that the CIO and senior business executives have a common view of IT investment priorities, but that has also declined in 2018 to 36 percent. The report concludes that these reductions suggest optimisation is still occurring in silos or that business leaders are impatient with the pace of IT and are spinning off shadow IT to lead their initiatives.

“Speed of products, solutions and digital innovation development has greatly increased,” said Enrico Maria Bagnasco, Head of Technology Innovation at Telecom Italia. “It is therefore important that companies keep an open dialogue with the external ecosystem and find a balance between business and technology to achieve the goals of digital transformation projects.”

Lack of digital culture stalls progress

In addition to the leadership challenges, the report also reveals that organisations have not been able to create the right digital culture for transformation success. Only 36 percent of companies said that there are possibilities for everyone in the firm to take part in the conversation around digital initiatives – a decline from 49 percent in 2012 – and just 38 percent say they have a formal program in place for digital reskilling of existing employees.

Additionally, senior business leaders need to engage their workforce in the digital transformation vision, but currently only 36 percent of organisations believe senior executives and managers share a common vision for transformation.

“Today’s technology landscape is much more complex than in 2012. New technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation and the IoT are providing businesses with opportunities they have never had before, but critical to their success is the ability to adapt and embed these technologies into their organisations,” says Cyril Garcia, head of Digital Services at Capgemini.

“To take full advantage of the new technology landscape, it’s vital that business leaders not only invest in new technology but work together with their employees to advance the digital transformation agenda, putting just as much emphasis on change management as they do in understanding of the technology.”

How to sustain digital transformation journeys

Today, many organisations face the realities of the complexities of their journeys and realise just how challenging successfully transforming can be. Organisations have not moved forward fast enough, states the report.

Talent and culture is also a major challenge that stands in the way of success. The report recommends that a renewed focus on the key dimensions for success in digital transformation, such as operations and governance and in particular, talent and culture, will help organisations revitalise their digital transformations.

About the research

Capgemini’s Digital Transformation Institute surveyed more than 1,300 business leaders in over 750 organisations with the majority (71%) reporting revenues of over 1 billion dollar.

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The survey further revealed that European workers said that their CIO is more aware of technical challenges (58 percent) than U.S. workers believe they are (41 percent).

“Non-IT workers aren’t likely to use the IT help desk as their first source of assistance, and are less likely to believe in the value of their IT organisation,” said Whit Andrews, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Only one in five non-IT workers would ask their IT department to supply best practices for employing technology.”

The survey also revealed that millennials were less likely to approach IT support teams through conventional means. About 53 percent of surveyed millennials outside the IT department said that one of their first three ways to solve a problem with digital technology would be to look for an answer on the internet.

Non-IT workers were overall more likely than IT workers to express dissatisfaction with the technologies supplied for their work. IT workers express greater satisfaction with their work devices than do workers outside IT departments. Only 41 percent of non-IT workers felt very or completely satisfied with their work devices, compared to 59 percent of surveyed IT workers.

“Many IT departments will be more successful if they are able to provide what workers say they need, and provide inspiration so they can increase the workforce’s digital dexterity,” Mr. Andrews added.

IT workers feel more confident than non-IT workers at using digital technology. The survey found that 32 percent of IT workers characterised themselves as experts in the digital technologies they use in the workplace. Just 7 percent of non-IT workers felt the same. “While we expect IT people to feel more confident with digital technologies, these findings highlight how hard it is to help non-IT workers feel as digitally dexterous as IT workers do,” said Mr. Andrews.

Sixty-seven percent of non-IT workers feel that their organisation does not take advantage of their digital skills. “Organisations seeking to mature and expand their digital workplaces will find that expanding digital dexterity will accelerate this across the organisation,” added Mr. Andrews.

Digital technology satisfies 72 percent of digital workers

About three in four digital workers either somewhat agree (48 percent) or strongly agree (24 percent) that the digital technology their organisation provides enables them to accomplish their work.

The most common types of workplace application used by survey respondents were real-time messaging (58 percent), sharing tools (55 percent), and workplace social media (52 percent — see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Shape of Worker’s Days

Source: Gartner (June 2018)

However, significant distinctions exist in the workplace. “Millennial digital workers are more inclined than older age groups are to use workplace applications and devices that are not provided by their organisation, whether they are tolerated or not,” said Mr. Andrews. “They also have stronger opinions about the collaboration tools they select for themselves. They are more likely to indicate they should be allowed to use whatever social media they prefer for work purposes.”

In addition, relative to the total workforce, a larger proportion of millennials consider the applications they use in their personal lives to be more useful than those they are given at work. “Our survey found that 26 percent of workers between the ages of 18 and 24 use unapproved applications to collaborate with other workers, compared with just 10 percent of those aged between 55 and 74,” Mr. Andrews said.

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