Editorial

Hybrid IT complexity impacting public sector IT pro confidence

The continued shift to hybrid IT drives increased levels of IT management complexity, but tech pros feel a lack of confidence in how to best manage it, claims new SolarWinds report

Posted 15 June 2022 by Christine Horton


The acceleration of hybrid IT has increased network complexity for some organisations and caused several challenges for public sector IT professionals, according to a new study from SolarWinds.

The 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 public sector IT departments.

It says that 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 public sector organisations are increasingly experiencing—and ultimately hindered by—these pain points.

According to one IDC report, as more and more mission-critical workloads move to connected cloud architectures that span public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, enterprises recognize they need to invest in the tools that will help them ensure consistent policies and performance across all platforms and end users.  However, they face challenges such as budget, time constraints, and barriers to implementing observability as a strategy to keep pace with hybrid IT realities.     

The SolarWinds report also found public sector tech professionals feel less confident in their organisation’s ability to manage IT. While nearly half of public sector tech pro respondents (45 percent) state they leverage monitoring strategies to manage this complexity, 67 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.” 

“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

  • Almost one in five (17 percent) tech pros responded that the acceleration of hybrid IT has increased the complexity of their public sector organisation’s IT management. These tech pros reported the following top drivers of increased complexity:
  • New tools and/or technologies (50 percent)
  • Outdated staff skill sets no longer aligned with new technologies (40 percent)
  • Increased technology requirements from multiple departments (40 percent)
  • When asked about how confident tech pros were in their organisation’s ability to manage IT complexity:
  • Only 12 percent of tech pro respondents said they felt extremely confident
  • Half of respondents (50 percent) admitted they weren’t fully equipped to manage complexity and felt only somewhat confident
  • One-third of tech pro respondents (33 percent) were confident their organisation is equipped to manage IT complexity adequately
  • An additional three percent were not confident at all

When asked about current IT monitoring/management strategies, 67 percent of respondents stated they only have visibility into about half or less of their apps and infrastructure. 

Additionally, most respondents (88 percent) agreed that return on investment (ROI) was impacted during an IT project they oversaw in the past 12–18 months due to increased hybrid IT complexity.

There is also a planned lack of investment despite the fact nearly half of respondents (45 percent) said the best solution to manage increased complexity is to adopt IT management tools.