New research from Cloudera shows that 95 percent of organizations have postponed or canceled AI projects due to infrastructure limitations and governance challenges.
The Cloudera study, ‘The Great AI Re-Architecture’, demonstrates that organizations worldwide are implementing fundamental changes to their data infrastructure. The growth of AI within companies exposes the shortcomings of legacy architectures, resulting in many organizations revising their approach to better meet the demands of modern AI applications.
The study is based on responses from 1,500 Enterprise Architects, Cloud Infrastructure Leads, and Data Architects from various regions. These respondents represent companies from the Americas, EMEA, and APAC with a minimum size of one thousand employees.
Infrastructure slows down AI projects
Although 77 percent of organizations are actively using AI, 95 percent have postponed or canceled at least one AI project in the past year. The primary causes are challenges in the areas of data management, compliance, and regulation. According to the study, 72 percent of respondents believe that their current data architecture requires a thorough overhaul to support future AI requirements.
The shift toward hybrid environments, where data is located in the cloud, on-premises, and at the edge, plays a major role in this. This enables organizations to apply AI to data wherever it resides, without compromising on control or security.
Governance and costs
The integration of AI leads to higher infrastructure costs: 84 percent of the surveyed organizations have noticed a cost increase. Three-quarters of the respondents indicate that AI has changed data storage and architecture. Governance proves to be a fundamental success factor, as 73 percent state that AI has made data governance more complex.
More than half of the organizations have postponed or canceled more than six AI projects in the past year due to governance or compliance issues. Additionally, almost everyone (97%) moves data between different environments monthly, making consistent governance across cloud, private cloud, on-premises, and edge environments essential.