All CIOs are having to do more with less. While IT budgets have increased overall, many anticipate this will be outstripped by significant price increases in products and services across the IT landscape, according to Gartner. Faced with these ongoing cost increases, CIOs must look at ways to simplify operations to make the investments they need to stay competitive.
No wonder then that cost control and expense management were named as a higher area of focus for CIOs over driving business innovation or leading change efforts, according to Foundry’s 2025 State of the CIO survey. It’s a role under significant pressure, with over one-fifth describing their stress levels as significant, while 15% feel a high degree of burnout.
Liz Brown, Director of Enterprise Cloud Solutions Practice at Colt, argues that complexity is the core of the problem. “Whether it’s legacy networks, fragmented tooling, manual processes and systems or complexity across the whole technology stack, it all drives up the financial and human costs.” She sees simplification as a strategic lever: “reducing the burden on teams, cutting out duplication and freeing up time, capacity and energy for higher value work.”
Modernise and simplify
For Brown, this simplification starts with replacing outdated systems with integrated modular platforms built on a hybrid mix of public and private cloud. Just moving applications to the public cloud is not always the right answer; without the right governance and control, costs can spiral. Privacy, regulatory and data sovereignty concerns may also make a pure public cloud play a non-starter.
However, with the right governance and control in place, enterprises have clearer cost attribution, and more scope to identify redundant systems and unnecessary cost centres. They can see the manual processes that can be automated or streamlined. “Organisations can see who is spending and where they’re spending, and they’ve got the insights which can then play into optimisation,” says Brown.
Colt has seen this in action with one of its long-term customers – a UK financial services organisation looking to refresh its entire technology infrastructure. By modernising legacy systems and shifting applications to a mix of cloud services, the organisation built a stable, uptime-guaranteed foundation – using public cloud to extend its application availability and enhance resilience.
Brown adds that many enterprise customers are stepping away from running their own data centres and infrastructure and are looking to partners to help them modernise. Colt works with organisations to audit and refresh their application landscape, looking at their systems and infrastructure and making intelligent, platform-agnostic recommendations.
This process can also enable IT leaders to take a step back from their IT portfolio to see where complexity is causing inefficiency – something that can be particularly valuable where mergers and acquisitions have resulted in layers of redundant or duplicate services.
“It isn’t just about spend” says Brown, “it’s about how we drive efficiency and transparency, cost optimisation and adaptability across both tech and talent. CIOs have really got to think about where complexity is costing them.”
Simplification eases the pressure on IT teams and creates space for innovation – an approach Colt helps enterprises put into practice every day. Discover how at colt.net/solutions