The acceleration of hybrid IT has increased network complexity for most organisations and caused several worrisome challenges for IT professionals, according to the latest SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2022.
Hybrid and remote work have amplified the impact of distributed and complex IT environments. Running workloads and applications across both cloud and on-premises infrastructure can be challenging, and many organisations are increasingly experiencing—and ultimately hindered by—these pain points.
The new SolarWinds report revealed that tech professionals feel less confident in their organisation’s ability to manage IT. While nearly half (42 percent) of tech pro respondents state they leverage monitoring strategies to manage this complexity, 58 percent 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, 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.”
The SolarWinds’ study also noted that tech pros cited key factors driving complexities such as inefficient change management processes (60 percent), outdated staff skillsets no longer aligned with new technologies (40 percent), increased technology requirements from multiple departments (40 percent) and new tools and/or technologies (35 percent).
Interestingly, 50 percent of small businesses indicated outdated staff skillsets no longer aligned with new technologies as the leading cause for increased complexity, compared to 22 percent of their mid-size and 57 percent of their enterprise counterparts.
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.
When asked about current IT monitoring/management strategies, 58 percent of respondents stated they only have visibility into about half or less of their apps and infrastructure.
By business size, 36 percent of mid-sized businesses and 37 percent of enterprise tech pro respondents indicated their organisation provides visibility into most of their apps and infrastructure compared to only 18 percent of their small business counterparts.
The report highlighted that organisations’ lack of insight into their networks impacts ROI. Most respondents (84 percent) 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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Overcoming IT complexity obstacles and improving ROI will be difficult, with budget and time constraints looming. Respondents revealed several barriers to improving visibility and implementing observability as an IT strategy including outdated technology environments (42 percent), time constraints (33 percent), lack of resources (33 percent) and lack of budget (30 percent).
SolarWinds found that there is a planned lack of investment despite the fact almost half of respondents (42 percent) said the best solution to manage increased complexity is to adopt IT management tools.
“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.”
