Tech professionals feel less confident in their organisation’s ability to manage IT, as the acceleration of hybrid IT has increased network complexity for most firms and caused several worrisome challenges for IT professionals, according to the IT Trends Report 2022 from SolarWinds.
The report studied markets in North America, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom. There were 1,138 respondents, 106 technology practitioners, managers, directors, and senior executives in Singapore.
While two in every five (40%) tech pro respondents state they leverage monitoring strategies to manage this complexity, more than half (56%) revealed they lack visibility into the majority of their organisation’s apps and infrastructure.
This lack of visibility impacts their ability to conduct anomaly detection, easy root-cause analysis, and other critical processes to ensure the availability, performance, and security of business-critical applications.
“Operational complexity prevents organisations from capitalising on their technology-driven transformation and investments and delivering benefits for end users,” said Sudhakar Ramakrishna, president and CEO of SolarWinds.
The CEO said 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.
“However, organisations 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,” he added.
Findings show that one in four tech pros (26%) responded the acceleration of hybrid IT has increased the complexity of their organisation’s IT management. Among them, 54% said increased technology requirements from multiple departments was the top driver of increased complexity.
Two-thirds (67%) of small businesses indicated increased technology requirements from multiple departments were the leading cause for increased complexity, compared to 50% of their mid-size and enterprise counterparts.
When asked about how confident tech pros were in their organisation’s ability to manage IT complexity, only 19% said they felt extremely confident.
In terms of business size, more than half (55%) of mid-size tech pros said they’re confident (44%) or extremely confident (11%) in managing IT complexity, while 57% of enterprise tech pros said they’re confident (32%) or extremely confident (25%).
Further, organisations’ lack of insight into their networks impacts ROI. Nearly all respondents (81%) agreed ROI was impacted during an IT project they oversaw in the past 12–18 months due to increased hybrid IT complexity.
Overcoming IT complexity obstacles and improving ROI will be difficult, with budget and time constraints looming.
Respondents say the largest barriers to improving visibility and implementing observability as an IT strategy are outdated technology environments (41%); lack of resources (33%); lack of budget (32%).
