A survey of  enterprise IT leaders found less than a third (32%) are extremely confident that they have the right technology, processes and people in place to execute an effective approach to IT management.

The survey, conducted by Rocket Software, polled 275 U.S. IT leaders in organizations with more than 1,000 employees. A full 93% of IT leaders are also committed to maximize the value of investments in existing platforms.

As a result, the top priorities for IT leaders are hybrid cloud computing (65%), data and content management (68%) followed by DevOps and infrastructure and application modernization, tied at 58%, and automation (57%).

A total of 62% noted they have a much greater focus on efficiency due to the economic landscape, with faster DevOps processes, automated processes and increasing overall output as the top three improvements that would be most impactful for increasing efficiency.

The survey also suggested many organizations still have much work to do to achieve those goals, with 63% of respondents spending anywhere from six to 15 hours on manual data entry and analysis each week.

Phil Buckellew, president of infrastructure modernization for Rocket Software, said most organizations are still trying to determine the right level of DevOps to adopt. Few organizations have implemented DevOps workflows on an end-to-end basis, with many employing a mix of DevOps and waterfall processes to build and deploy applications across a hybrid cloud computing environment, he noted.

Overall, IT leaders are most worried about improving overall IT performance (60%), data security (50%), process risk and compliance (46%) and the need to improve agility (41%), the survey found. Respondents also noted that they measure success within their IT organization by increased efficiency (71%), optimized resources (67%) and reduced risk (63%).

The survey makes it clear that, despite challenges, enterprise IT organizations are committed to hybrid cloud computing as they become more comfortable with using various platforms that are fit for purpose, said Buckellew.

Mainframes, for example, continue to play a major role in running online transaction processing (OLTP) applications alongside analytics applications that are now being infused with artificial intelligence (AI) capabililities, noted Buckellew.

A quarter of survey respondents also identified providing cloud applications with access to mainframe data as an area where they need additional tools, followed by automation (22%).

The biggest automation obstacles are the complexity of implementing automation (18%), resistance to process change among workforce (18%) and lack of skillsets to implement automation (18%), the survey finds.

As always, the biggest challenge in enterprise IT environments is often simple inertia. Organizations that have been building and deploying applications on mainframes, for example, have been relying on waterfall processes for decades. Many of them have now adopted DevOps processes to varying degrees, but few have completely replaced legacy approaches to building and deploying software, noted Buckellew.

It’s not likely the management of complex hybrid cloud computing environments will be simplified any time soon, but progress continues to be made. Soon, AI may automate many existing manual tasks. In the meantime, however, the number of enterprise IT organizations standardizing on a single IT platform remains few and far between.