Extra tags: IT
SolarWinds, a leading provider of simple, powerful, and secure IT management software, released the findings of its ninth annual IT Trends Report. This year’s report, The SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2022—Getting IT Right: Managing Hybrid IT Complexity, examines the acceleration of digital transformation efforts and its impact on IT departments. The report found the acceleration of hybrid IT has increased network complexity for most organisations and caused several worrisome challenges for IT professionals.
Hybrid and remote work have increased the impact of scattered and complicated IT environments. Running workloads and apps across cloud and on-premises infrastructure may be difficult, and many businesses are increasingly encountering — and ultimately being hampered by — these issues. According to an IDC report, as more mission-critical workloads migrate to connected cloud architectures that span public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, enterprises are realising the need to invest in tools to ensure consistent policies and performance across all platforms and end-users. However, they encounter obstacles like financial restrictions, time constraints, and barriers to applying observability as a strategy to stay up with hybrid IT reality.
In addition, according to the new SolarWinds survey, IT professionals are less confident in their organisation's capacity to manage IT. While nearly half of tech professionals (40%) say they use monitoring measures to deal with this complexity, 56% say they have no insight into most of their company's apps and infrastructure. Their ability to undertake anomaly detection, quick root-cause analysis, and other important operations to assure business-critical systems' availability, performance, and security is hampered by this lack of visibility.
“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, SolarWinds. “As organisations look beyond the pandemic, they must re-examine their investments from the past few years. Part of that requires organisations to have visibility into their IT environments to understand what’s working and not working, and where to prioritise their efforts to achieve the ROI targeted in their planned projects.”
“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, 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.”
2022 Key Findings
The continued expansion of hybrid IT is driving increased levels of IT management complexity, but tech pros feel a lack of confidence in how to best manage it.
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One in four tech pros (26%) responded the acceleration of hybrid IT has increased the complexity of their organisation’s IT management.
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These tech pros reported the following top drivers of increased complexity:
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Increased technology requirements from multiple departments (54%)
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New tools and/or technologies (39%)
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Inefficient change management processes (39%)
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Interestingly, 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.
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When asked about how confident tech pros were in their organisation’s ability to manage IT complexity:
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Only 19% of tech pro respondents said they felt extremely confident
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40% admitted they weren’t fully equipped to manage complexity and felt only somewhat confident
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A third (33%) of tech pro respondents were confident their organisation is equipped to manage IT complexity adequately
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An additional 8% weren’t confident at all
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When tech pros’ level of confidence is considered by business size, confidence levels increased among enterprise and mid-size businesses:
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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%).
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Meanwhile, small businesses experienced the lowest level of confidence, with only 26% of respondents saying they’re confident.
A particular area of concern among respondents is visibility. With the increased shift to complex, hybrid IT environments, technology professionals say they have limited visibility into their networks, apps, and infrastructure.
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When asked about current IT monitoring/management strategies, 56% of respondents stated they only have visibility into about half or less of their apps and infrastructure.
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By business size, 41% of mid-size business tech pro respondents and 30% of enterprise tech pro respondents indicated their organisation provides visibility into most of their apps and infrastructure compared to only 29% of their small business counterparts.
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The top three aspects lacking from respondents who felt their current IT monitoring/management strategies provide visibility into less than half of their apps and infrastructure strategy were the ability to gather metrics from disparate systems (50%), anomaly detection (45%), and correlated alerts (45%).
Organisations’ lack of insight into their networks impacts ROI.
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Nearly all respondents (81%) agreed return on investment (ROI) was impacted during an IT project they oversaw in the past 12–18 months due to increased hybrid IT complexity.
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Thirty-three per cent of respondents said the IT project in question took an additional four to seven months or more to complete
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Forty-four per cent said the project in question was extended by up to three months
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By business size, a larger percentage of small business tech pro respondents (29%) indicated a shorter delay of one to four weeks to achieve expected ROI when compared to their mid-size (19%) and enterprise counterparts (16%).
Overcoming IT complexity obstacles and improving ROI will be difficult, with budget and time constraints looming.
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Respondents say the largest barriers to improving visibility and implementing observability as an IT strategy are:
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Outdated technology environments (41%)
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Lack of resources (33%)
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Lack of budget (32%)
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Interestingly, a larger percentage of mid-size (41%) and enterprise (36%) tech pro respondents reported time constraints as a barrier compared to their small business counterparts (26%).
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As it relates to planned investment in IT management tools over the next 12 months:
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Nearly all (81%) of tech pros responded their organisation plans to invest less than 20% of overall IT budget
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Only 9% indicated their organisation will invest 20% or more
There is a planned lack of investment despite the fact more than one-third of respondents (40%) said the best solution to manage increased complexity is to adopt IT management tools.
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More than half (57%) of tech pro respondents state their organisation has prioritised adopting a hybrid IT strategy for their technology environment within the next three years.
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The biggest areas of impact respondents expect to see if their organisations implemented these IT management tools would be:
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Increased productivity (38%)
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Improved security (34%)
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Cost optimisation which drives budget savings (33%)
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Heightened performance of apps (33%)
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Other strategies respondents mentioned as important to help to meet complexity issues include:
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Investing in automation tools (48%)
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Outsourcing IT services (41%)
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Training staff and upskilling (41%)
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Adopt IT monitoring/management tools (40%)
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When asked to select the top ways their organisation’s experience with IT management complexity has influenced future technology investments:
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44% of tech pro respondents selected providing access to skills development training
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An additional 38% said testing large-scale rollouts via pilot programs first
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As business size increases, so does the percentage of tech pros stating their organisation provides access to skills development training.
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More than half (55%) of enterprise tech pro respondents selected providing access to skills development training when asked how IT management complexity has influenced their organisations’ future tech investments compared to 34% of their small business counterparts
Please visit the SolarWinds IT Trends Index, a dynamic web experience exploring the study’s findings and additional insights into the data broken down by region into charts, graphs, and socially shareable elements. Like previous IT Trends Reports, this year’s study features an interactive component where visitors to the web experience can see how they compare to the results.
The findings of this year’s Singapore report are based on a survey fielded in March 2022, which yielded responses from 106 technology practitioners, managers, directors, and senior executives in Singapore from public- and private-sector small, mid-size and enterprise organisations. All regions studied in 2022, as reported on the SolarWinds IT Trends Index, were North America, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom, with 1,138 respondents across all geographies combined.
