IT departments are engaging more with the rest of their businesses, but there is still room for improvement on delivering the resources required to meet objectives, according to findings published by Cisco.

The results are from a global survey of 1,300 IT decision makers across 13 countries and paint a mixed picture for IT professionals.

Although 63 percent of respondents said they are confident that IT can respond to business needs, 76 percent said that companies sometimes worked around the IT department to roll out new applications without its involvement.

The survey also appears to show that the corporate network is holding back progress in many cases, with many IT professionals claiming that their network is not ready for data centre consolidation or moving work to the cloud. Reasons given for holding up the successful rollout of new applications included not enough budget (34 percent of respondents), not enough staff (25 percent) and network limitations (26 percent).

Despite this (or perhaps because of it), 71 percent of IT decision makers indicated that they planned to deploy software-defined networking (SDN) solutions this year. Chief reasons for doing so are to enable automated provisioning, while 33 percent said they expected SDN to deliver savings.

The growth in importance of the cloud can be seen by the fact that one in five respondents said that none of their applications were cloud-based a year ago, while two thirds indicated that up to 20 percent of their applications were cloud-based within the same timeframe.

About half of respondents pointed to data protection or availability and reliability of cloud services as the major roadblocks to successful implementation of a cloud strategy.

Overall, Cisco’s report concludes that greater alignment is needed between IT planning and business requirements. This being Cisco, network transformation is also highlighted as a key need to deliver application and business transformation, with any plans for growth and innovation being tied to network readiness and adoption of new technologies.

The survey included IT decision makers from companies in the UK and other major European economies, the US, China, Russia, Brazil, India Australia and Japan.