The 2024 State of AI Infrastructure Report
shows that 93% of respondents said there would be consequences if
their organizations don't achieve the goals laid out in their AI
roadmaps
CHARLOTTE, N.C., July 23,
2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Flexential, a leading provider
of secure and flexible data center solutions, today released its
2024 State of AI Infrastructure Report, a new survey on AI
infrastructure investments and challenges. As organizations across
nearly all industries plan ambitious roadmaps for AI adoption,
Flexential's report highlights crucial areas where IT leaders must
evolve their current infrastructure to meet the growing demand of
high-density AI workloads and latency-sensitive AI
applications.
The report findings are based on a survey of 350 IT leaders at
organizations with over $100 million
in annual revenue, including 100 respondents at organizations with
over $2 billion in annual revenue.
The survey found that IT leaders are optimistic about plans to
integrate AI into their operations, yet they face challenges when
it comes to scalability, workforce skills gaps, security,
sustainability, and C-suite commitment to solutions.
Among organizations with AI roadmaps, 59% of respondents said
increasing IT infrastructure investments was an element of that
roadmap. Flexential's survey also found that 45% of respondents
from organizations with AI roadmaps said failing to meet the goals
in their roadmap would affect their ability to innovate –
suggesting that enterprises need to be dedicated to up-leveling AI
infrastructure and employing a strategic, proactive approach to AI
workload deployment in order to harness AI's potential. Notably,
nearly all respondents (93%) indicated there is a greater
expectation that IT leaders in their organization minimize
time-to-revenue for AI-driven IT infrastructure compared to five
years ago.
However, AI infrastructure investments face significant hurdles
for many organizations. Networking challenges and data center scale
are leading causes of AI performance issues, with 82% of
respondents having encountered a performance issue with their AI
workloads in the past 12 months related to bandwidth shortages
(43%), unreliable connections (41%), or difficulty scaling data
center space and power (34%).
"The stakes are high for AI infrastructure investments," said
Chris Downie, Chief Executive
Officer of Flexential. "Our survey shows that enterprise leaders
are ready to execute on ambitious AI plans, with over half of
leaders (53%) stating that C-level leadership is behind the
pressure to rapidly adopt AI. Yet, many enterprises feel held
back by significant challenges in their IT infrastructure,
workforce, or organization's leadership. The findings underscore
the urgency in addressing data center needs to successfully deliver
on their AI roadmaps and optimize performance through strategic IT
service partners."
Additional key findings from Flexential's report include:
- AI receives board-level scrutiny. AI initiatives
are increasingly driven by the C-suite and boards, with 53% and 46%
of respondents respectively identifying these groups as the main
forces behind AI adoption. This top-down pressure has increased
both support and scrutiny for AI investments.
- Finding the right people for the job is
difficult. 91% of respondents say they have experienced
some sort of skills or staffing gap related to AI in the past 12
months, and 53% reported skills gaps or staffing shortages related
to the management of specialized computing infrastructure.
- Privacy and security are a top priority. 42% of
respondents whose organizations have pulled an AI workload back
from public cloud said it was due to data privacy and security
concerns.
- High performance requirements lead organizations to partner
with experts. 51% of respondents are addressing
performance issues by using third-party colocation data centers to
process data closer to the edge of the network.
- Sustainability is top of mind. 94% of respondents would
pay more for data centers or third-party cloud vendors to use clean
or renewable energy and/or buy credits to offset their carbon
footprints.
Visit flexential.com to access the full 2024 State of AI
Infrastructure Report.
For more information on Flexential, visit:
www.flexential.com.
About Flexential:
Flexential empowers the IT journey of the most complex
businesses by offering customizable IT solutions designed for
today's demanding high-density computing requirements. With
colocation, cloud, connectivity, data protection, and professional
services, the FlexAnywhere® platform anchors our services in 42
data centers across 19 highly connected markets on a 100Gbps
private network backbone. Flexential solutions are strategically
engineered to meet the most stringent challenges in security,
compliance, and resiliency. Experience the power of IT flexibility
and how we enable digital transformation at www.flexential.com.
Company Contact:
Alison
Brooker
Senior Director, Corporate Marketing
610-745-2697
alison.brooker@flexential.com
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SOURCE Flexential