ITSM Is Effective in Remote Work Environment

Learn more about ManageEngine

As employees began working beyond the corporate perimeter, the data and tools local to their network became out of reach. Therefore, a majority (78%) of IT professionals overcame this hurdle by transitioning to cloud services, according to The State of ITSM in the COVID-19 Pandemic, a survey by ManageEngine.


Further, global IT teams have adopted new tools and applications to accommodate a dispersed workforce. This led to an increased requirement to update knowledge articles and user documentation to address the new technologies.

Worryingly, in these times with unprecedented service desk pressure, a considerable minority of organizations do not have self-service (28%) and virtual agent (24%) technologies to offset the workload. It is worth investing in them, as the survey evidenced high correlation of remote ITSM success among organizations that are leveraging such tools.

Other key findings show security concerns loom large, and greater recognition of IT's efforts are anticipated.

Impact of employee remote working

72% of IT professionals affirm ITSM's continued effectiveness even in remote work scenarios. However, only one in two organizations have a bring your own device (BYOD) policy to support continued productivity in new remote work environments.

Financial and asset management implications

4 out of 5 respondents believe IT will have greater appreciation in terms of budgets, salaries and recognition of efforts, post crisis. Only 15% of organizations were under-equipped with the necessary applications and tools to enable remote working, well into the crisis.

Security and governance issues

Only 40% of organizations confidently agreed that they are equipped to tackle the increase in security and privacy concerns related to employees working outside the office.

Third-party services and technology assistance

Among the organizations that outsourced ITSM, over 70% were satisfied with their MSP's performance. Interestingly, IT self-service was non-existent in 28% of the respondent's organization.

Business continuity success levels

Most organizations had a business continuity plan (BCP), leaving only 20% without one. A reliable BCP was an important factor for successful remote IT support.

"The pandemic has brought IT organizations to the front line from the back office overnight," said Rajesh Ganesan, VP at ManageEngine. "How well a business has performed in the last few months has a lot to do with how well its IT organization has been able to enable remote work, and this trend will only intensify. As businesses strive to survive, compete and eventually lead in these tough times, closing the technology gaps highlighted in the survey will be a priority."

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ITSM Is Effective in Remote Work Environment

Learn more about ManageEngine

As employees began working beyond the corporate perimeter, the data and tools local to their network became out of reach. Therefore, a majority (78%) of IT professionals overcame this hurdle by transitioning to cloud services, according to The State of ITSM in the COVID-19 Pandemic, a survey by ManageEngine.


Further, global IT teams have adopted new tools and applications to accommodate a dispersed workforce. This led to an increased requirement to update knowledge articles and user documentation to address the new technologies.

Worryingly, in these times with unprecedented service desk pressure, a considerable minority of organizations do not have self-service (28%) and virtual agent (24%) technologies to offset the workload. It is worth investing in them, as the survey evidenced high correlation of remote ITSM success among organizations that are leveraging such tools.

Other key findings show security concerns loom large, and greater recognition of IT's efforts are anticipated.

Impact of employee remote working

72% of IT professionals affirm ITSM's continued effectiveness even in remote work scenarios. However, only one in two organizations have a bring your own device (BYOD) policy to support continued productivity in new remote work environments.

Financial and asset management implications

4 out of 5 respondents believe IT will have greater appreciation in terms of budgets, salaries and recognition of efforts, post crisis. Only 15% of organizations were under-equipped with the necessary applications and tools to enable remote working, well into the crisis.

Security and governance issues

Only 40% of organizations confidently agreed that they are equipped to tackle the increase in security and privacy concerns related to employees working outside the office.

Third-party services and technology assistance

Among the organizations that outsourced ITSM, over 70% were satisfied with their MSP's performance. Interestingly, IT self-service was non-existent in 28% of the respondent's organization.

Business continuity success levels

Most organizations had a business continuity plan (BCP), leaving only 20% without one. A reliable BCP was an important factor for successful remote IT support.

"The pandemic has brought IT organizations to the front line from the back office overnight," said Rajesh Ganesan, VP at ManageEngine. "How well a business has performed in the last few months has a lot to do with how well its IT organization has been able to enable remote work, and this trend will only intensify. As businesses strive to survive, compete and eventually lead in these tough times, closing the technology gaps highlighted in the survey will be a priority."

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Performance Bottleneck in Enterprise AI Has Been Exposed – Now We Must Fix It

Performance bottlenecks aren't uncommon when it comes to rolling out new technology, regardless of how capable or game-changing that technology might be. Every generation of new tech has encountered roadblocks that had to be overcome before it was truly able to shine. Virtualization forced organizations to rethink resource allocation, cloud transformation had us shift our focus toward scalability and elasticity, and microservices introduced entirely new challenges around observability and distributed systems. There's something different about AI, however ...

What Capital Markets Can Teach Enterprises About Integrated Data Infrastructure

Consider a single order represented across order-management, execution, and settlement systems. Each database, message broker, and application may be online and processing its own records correctly. Yet the workflow has failed if related events arrive on different clocks, rely on inconsistent state, or cannot be reconciled before an operational decision must be made ...

Why AI in IT Is Producing High Productivity but Heavy Workloads

AI now exists in almost every IT workflow. In a recent survey of more than 800 IT service professionals, all respondents indicated the use of AI in some form within their organization. But there's a growing paradox: if dashboards are clearing faster and alerts are resolved at unprecedented speed, why aren't IT service desks reporting lighter workloads? The research found that 71% of IT teams said their actual workload has remained flat or increased since adopting AI. This reality appears to contradict what we’ve been told about AI ...

Implementing AI Isn't the Hard Part Anymore - Adoption Is

Two years ago, almost every customer conversation about AI started with the same questions: Which model should we use? What can it do? Is it ready for the enterprise? Today, those discussions have moved on. CIOs are far more interested in how to govern AI, integrate it with existing systems, prepare their workforce and make it part of everyday operations. The challenge is no longer to prove that AI can deliver value. It's instead about how to embed AI into the business in a way that's secure, scalable and delivers measurable outcomes ...

The Incident Load Is Rising, but Recovery Times Aren't Moving

Two things happened to production incidents between 2023 and now, and they did not happen at the same speed. The first is that a class of dependency that barely existed three years ago now accounts for one incident in ten. Incidents disclosed by AI model and AI application providers rose from 1.7% of all disclosed unplanned incidents in 2023 to 10.7% in 2026 year to date, roughly a sixfold rise; that counts only incidents at AI companies themselves, so the true share is higher. The second is that the time to close an incident has not come down ...

Your AI Pipeline May Have a Document Observability Problem

When an AI assistant gives an incomplete or incorrect answer, teams often blame the model. They adjust prompts, switch models, increase context windows or test a new retrieval strategy. However the model may not be a problem. In many enterprise AI workflows, the problem begins inside the document-ingestion pipeline ...

The SIEM Isn't the Problem. Your Telemetry Architecture Is

If you talk to any security or observability teams right now, they're all fighting the same fire: their tooling was built to ingest X, but their sources are pumping Y and soon to be doing Z. The knee-jerk reaction is always the same: we need more platform. However, this reaction is wrong. Let me explain why, because the solution to this problem is foundational, not financial. Instead of hurling yet more money at the problem, make sure you've done what's needed upstream ...

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Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...

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AI is usually talked about as a software tool, but it also depends heavily on the network behind it. Whether a company is using AI for chatbots, automation, monitoring, analytics, or employee support, all of that information has to move across the network in a reliable and secure way. That means AI is not just an application decision. It is also an infrastructure decision. Before organizations rush into AI, they should ask a simple question: Is our network ready to support it? ...

Agentic Operations Begin with Governed Middleware Access

Enterprise AI often lacks governed access to where business processes actually execute. Without that access, AI agents may be able to reason, but they cannot operate reliably across enterprise workflows. For AI agents to effectively carry out workflows, they will require integration-layer context and controls. Organizations can implement these prerequisites by providing AI with managed access to the middleware layer ...