The acceleration of digital transformation efforts across businesses offers many advantages and benefits to businesses. But it also poses huge challenges, particularly for existing IT networks.
Recent data from SolarWinds suggests that one aspect of the digital transformation, the acceleration of hybrid IT infrastructure has led to increased network complexity for most organizations, causing several challenges for IT professionals. These professionals discovered the hard way that running workloads and applications across both cloud and on-premises infrastructure can be a struggle.
A report by IDC has noted that while enterprises recognize they need to invest in the tools that will help them ensure performance across all platforms and end-users, they simultaneously face challenges such as budget, time constraints, and barriers to implementing observability as a strategy to keep pace with hybrid IT realities.
It also found that while 54% of tech professionals are able to leverage monitoring strategies to manage this complexity, 49% lack visibility into the majority of their organization’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.
It has thus become more crucial for organizations to re-examine their technology investments from the past few years to determine what is working and what is not and where to prioritize their efforts to achieve the desired return on investments. And in order to ensure the effectiveness of this reevaluation, it is also crucial for organizations to set aside time and resources to upskill and train tech professionals so these professionals can properly implement observability strategies and manage hybrid IT realities more effectively ensuring success in the long run.
Key Challenges
IT professionals identified some key challenging areas that need to be addressed:
IT management complexity
The continued expanse of hybrid IT is driving increased levels of IT management complexity, but many IT professionals feel they lack the confidence in how to manage it.
They cited the following top factors that have increased IT management complexity:
Fragmentation between legacy technologies and new technologies
Increased technology requirements from multiple departments
New tools and/or technologies
Maintenance of a legacy technology stack
Visibility
With the increased shift to complex, hybrid IT environments, technology professionals say they have limited visibility into their networks, apps, and infrastructure, with 49% of them saying they only have visibility into about half or less of their apps and infrastructure, particularly with regards to anomaly detection, easy root-cause analysis, and the ability to gather metrics from disparate systems.
Budget Allocation
The research highlighted that 53% of tech pros responded their organizations plan to invest less than 20% of the overall IT budget, while 19% indicated their organizations will invest 20% or more. Another cause for concern is a perceived lack of investment despite 54% of respondents saying the best solution is to manage adopting IT management tools.
Barriers to Addressing Challenges
According to IT professionals, the largest barriers to improving visibility and implementing observability are the following:
Time constraints
Lack of resources
Lack of budget
In relation to the third point, 28% of IT professionals say they have no insight into their overall IT budget. This becomes more of a problem for small businesses, where 52% of the IT professionals in such businesses say the budget is a barrier.
Possible Solutions
Despite the issues presented, there are some positive developments that are noteworthy. 75% of IT professionals said their organizations have prioritized adopting a hybrid IT strategy for their technology environment within the next three years. Such an approach is seen as favorable in addressing digital complexities.
Other strategies would include:
Training staff and upskilling
Adopting IT monitoring/management tools
Investing in automation tools
Outsourcing IT services
When asked to select the top ways their organization’s experience with IT management complexity has influenced future technology investments, 41% of IT professionals selected providing access to skills development training, most of them from small businesses. Meanwhile, 33% selected new roles/hiring specialists and increasing or ramping up investments, many coming from the enterprise sector.