The acceleration of digital transformation efforts is making IT administration overly complicated and more difficult, leading to a more challenging profession and lowering IT’s network management confidence, according to a new report from IT management software company SolarWinds.
The company’s IT Trends Report 2022, titled “Getting IT Right: Managing Hybrid IT Complexity,” looks into how remote and hybrid work and the accelerated pace of enterprise technology adoption is impacting IT departments and amplifying IT’s challenges.
Specifically, running workloads and applications across both cloud and on-premises infrastructure is proving to be challenging for IT professionals, resulting in a lowered confidence in their ability to manage their organization’s IT assets.
According to the report, nearly half (49%) of IT professionals surveyed say they lack visibility into the majority of their organization’s apps and infrastructure despite the majority (54%) leveraging monitoring tools.
That lack of visibility is impacting their ability to detect anomalies and identity the underlying cause of IT issues, leading to availability, performance and security issues, according to SolarWinds’ report.
Specifically, IT pros indicated that fragmentation between legacy technology and new technology, increasing technology requirements from multiple departments, new tools and technologies and maintaining legacy technology is driving their IT department’s challenges.
When asked about their confidence level to manage their organization’s growing IT complexity, most admitted to having some doubt about their ability to do so, and just 8% of respondents said they felt extremely confident.
Meanwhile, 36% said they felt somewhat confidence, and just 50% said they were adequately confident. Another 4% said they weren’t confident at all.
Interestingly, smaller businesses’ IT departments were more confident than their enterprise counterparts, with nearly two-thirds of small business tech pros saying they were either confident or extremely confident in managing IT complexity.
SolarWinds’ IT Trends Report 2022 discovered that about half of respondents only have visibility into about half or less of their apps and infrastructure, with anomaly detection, root-cause analysis and gathering metrics from disparate systems the top three visibility challenges.
Hybrid IT complexity is also impacted return on investment of IT projects, with 54% saying ROI was negatively impacted over the last year-and-a-half, with many citing time constraints, lack of resources and lack of budget as the largest barriers to improving visibility.
However, IT pros say their organization isn’t willing to invest in tools they need to help manage that IT complexity and gain much-needed visibility into disparate IT systems, with 53% of tech pros saying their organization plans to invest less than 20% of their overall IT budget in IT management tools over the next 12 months. Just 19% invest 20% or more, per SolarWinds’ report.
Despite that lack of investment, 75% of IT pros surveyed say their organization has prioritized adopting a hybrid IT strategy over the next three years.
To help carry out those goals, IT pros say they need improved security, heightened performance of apps, improved end user/customer experience and faster response IT response times, in addition to training, management tools, automation and outsourcing IT.
These complex IT environments are clearly preventing organizations from carrying out their objectives and helping end users become more productive, says Sudhakar Ramakrishna, president and CEO of SolarWinds.
“As organizations look beyond the pandemic, they must re-examine their investments from the past few years,” Ramakrishna says. “Part of that requires organizations to have visibility into their IT environments to understand what’s working and not working, and where to prioritize their efforts to achieve the ROI targeted in their planned projects.”
Although not explicitly mentioned in the report or supporting press release, SolarWinds recently launched Hybrid Cloud Observability, a new IT management platform designed to give organizations visibility into the IT systems that are supporting the distributed workforce.
SolarWinds bills Hybrid Cloud Observability platform as a solution to an ongoing digital transformation and the deployment of new apps, databases and hybrid and multi-cloud deployments while supporting traditional workloads and systems, leading to the use of various monitoring and management tools across different teams.
“Observability is increasingly becoming the clear answer for tech pros charged with managing greater levels of complexity in these diverse and distributed environments spanning on-premises, private and public clouds,” added Ramakrishna. “However, organizations must set aside time and resources to upskill and train tech pros to help them properly implement observability strategies and manage hybrid IT realities more effectively—and set up their teams and business for success in the long run.”
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