The drive for digital transformation has impacted virtually every business and industry across the globe. It can be easy to focus on the trends and movements that are taking place on the massive scale that the modern digital era has enabled—and there is certainly value in doing so.
Yet one critical piece of the story is often missing: what the changing IT landscape means for the professionals tasked with the day-to-day responsibilities of managing enterprise IT infrastructure—and in turn, what their perspective says about the future of IT.
What are they most concerned about? What are the big challenges they see facing global IT organizations, and which ones do they consider most pressing? What are their priorities? How do they spend their time at work, and perhaps more telling, how do they wish they spent their time?
In short: What is the state of enterprise IT infrastructure, and what insights can we glean from the perspectives of the IT professionals responsible for its management and operation?
In an effort to tackle some of these big questions, we conducted a new survey of 500 IT professionals, asking them about a variety of subjects, ranging from their IT infrastructure environments and day-to-day responsibilities to resource allocation strategy and how they feel IT is perceived.
The Big Takeaways
The survey produced a snapshot of the IT function in flux, as environments are migrated off-premise and IT professionals (not just executives) are eager for greater strategic responsibility and adjusting to shifting expectations—all on top of day-to-day responsibilities.
Multicloud and Hybrid IT Have Arrived
The vast majority of organizations with on-premise infrastructure already have workloads in colocation or cloud environments (89 percent), with a majority planning to move at least some infrastructure off-prem within the next three years.
Cybersecurity and Cloud Migrations Are Top Challenges
More than 1 in 3 respondents (36 percent) identified protecting their organization from cyberattacks as their No. 1 concern for 2019. No surprise, considering respondents estimated that 1 in 4 of their organization’s servers or cloud instances are behind on security patches, largely due to the time it takes to keep up with the ever-evolving threat landscape. Following security, other top challenges included migrating applications to the cloud (34 percent) and adopting/managing a multicloud strategy (28 percent).
Time Isn’t Always IT’s Friend
8 in 10 IT pros (82 percent) cite at least one server- or cloud-related activity they spend too much time on. Similarly, 77 percent say there is at least one task they don’t spend enough time on. By and large, the data suggests that IT pros dedicate too many hours to monitoring and maintenance and not enough to designing or implementing new solutions.
There’s More to Come
To read about these insights and more, download the report below—and keep an eye on our ThinkIT blog over the next few weeks: We’ll be diving deep into each of these topics and more.
