The New Year. An opportunity for reflection— I wish I had modernized more IT systems—and resolution—I will endeavor to eliminate all technical debt.

What hasn’t changed is that IT leaders will continue to struggle with the same pain points and concerns as they shepherd digital transformations that make their businesses more resilient while elevating experience for customers and employees alike.

Indeed, although 85% of CEOs ramped up digital initiatives, most still can’t explain how their overall strategy and technology investments ladder up to deliver business outcomes, according to Deloitte Insights research.

What are the top pain points? More importantly—what can you do about them? These recommendations will help IT leaders light the way for their teams.

Pain point 1: Data security
Poll IT leaders and you’ll see that ransomware, bad actors and other threats top their lists of concerns, thanks in part to a proliferation of high-profile hacks over the last decade. In fact, 67% of organizations cited increases in ransomware and malware as significant concerns, according to a Dell survey conducted in 2022. Moreover, CIOs are facing increased pressure from corporate boards of directors demanding greater resilience against cybersecurity attacks.

Recommendation: With the threat landscape growing more complex, your best bet is having data protection, along with cyber recovery systems that help you remediate compromised data in an intelligent digital vault. You should also lean on trusted cybersecurity partners to help you recover your data and applications with confidence. Ultimately, proactive measures are the best defense—barring a cybersecurity tool you brought back from your time machine trip to the future.

Pain point 2: Talent
Tech talent is in short supply for most positions. Even so, if you’re going to execute digital transformations, you need seasoned staffers to manage modern operating models, including cloud infrastructure and cloud-native technologies. And in this digital age, you can’t have enough software programmers.

Recommendation: Offer optimal work-from-anywhere flexibility, along with a secure, consistent and frictionless experiences to increase your potential talent pool. Greet candidates with modern tech stacks and empower them with continuous learning opportunities so they can learn new skills on the job. Such offers may help you retain talent in a hyper-competitive market.

Pain point 3: Technical Debt
Perhaps the hardest challenge to solve—which is why it rarely gets solved—technical debt remains a burden for most businesses of a certain age. Traditionally treated as a problem rooted in legacy software code, technical debt is also growing in multicloud estates due to the disparate interfaces, configurations and codebases associated with working with several cloud vendors.

Recommendation. Some experts suggest measuring technical debt to get a handle on how to winnow it out. But as you refresh your IT consider strategic approaches in which you modernize your IT estate to position your organization for future growth. That will require some financial jujitsu—which you’re likely already exercising as you deal with the final pain point.

Pain point 4: Cost Cutting
Rising interest rates and inflation have companies more focused on reining in costs. CEOs and CFOs are asking their line of business managers tough questions like: Are they spending their money efficiently? Should they reduce their capital expenditures? In response to those inquiries, IT leaders will assess their portfolios for runaway spending on public cloud services and shadow IT. Yet this whack-a-mole cost-cutting alone won’t suffice.

Recommendation: Be wary of shiny new tech toys. Figure out what business outcomes ladder up to corporate strategy and focus on the technology you need to deliver them. A consumption-based IT model can help you preserve precious capital by aligning technology solutions with business requirements. Ideally, this will help you deliver the desired outcomes for your business peers.

A New Year Means New Opportunity
Sure, 2023 holds serious challenges and financial pressures, but digital transformation need not be your Holy Grail.

The new year affords you the chance to reset your IT portfolio and reallocate assets to initiatives that will help your business level up by offering optimal outcomes for employees and customers.

As it happens, you can focus on strategic innovation while curbing runaway costs. Dell Technologies APEX portfolio includes as-a-Service solutions offering simplicity, agility and control while prioritizing security and governance.

The portfolio also includes cyber recovery services to help you mitigate the fallout from a breach, satisfying compliance peers concerned about corporate risk.