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Business Decisions: The Evolving Role of the Modern IT Professional

Suaad Sait

Increasing infrastructure complexity has affected the role of nearly all IT professionals, creating the need for new skillsets, including the ability to help companies make informed, strategic business decisions, according to the SolarWinds New IT Survey, which sheds light on the evolving role of the modern IT professional in today’s technology-driven business environment.

While most IT professionals are at least some degree confident in their ability to provide such advice, more preparation is needed to feel completely confident.

The days of IT's limited impact on business are long gone, replaced by the modern era of almost complete reliance on technology and the incredibly complex infrastructure it brings with it. Something as simple as an incorrect server configuration can lead to loss of access to cloud-based applications and data, email server outages and ecommerce site shutdowns.

These and other IT issues can have tremendous negative impact on productivity and revenue generation. As a result, more businesses are starting to recognize that behind their success are teams of IT heroes that need to be involved in business-level decisions. Likewise, IT professionals need to be prepared to take on this new role.

Survey Findings:

Technology's rise in importance as a core business component may have only been outpaced by the complexity it created. This increasing infrastructure complexity has affected the role of nearly all IT professionals.

- Over half of all IT departments now manage virtualization, mobility, compliance, data analytics, SDN/virtual networks, BYOx, cloud computing and self-service automation

- 52% of respondents said increasing complexity has greatly affected their responsibilities over the past 3-5 years, and an additional 42% said it has somewhat affected their role

Foremost among the results of this evolution, modern IT professionals are now expected and must be prepared to help their companies make informed, strategic business decisions with regard to emerging technologies.

- 99% of respondents said they are given the opportunity to at least occasionally provide guidance and expertise necessary to help their companies make such decisions

- While 95% of survey-takers said they feel at least somewhat confident in their ability to provide such advice, only one-third of those are completely confident doing so

- To feel more empowered to provide such advice, slightly more than half of respondents said they need more training in their area(s) of responsibility, and nearly 40% said they need a better understanding of their companies’ overall business

In addition, this evolution of IT and the increasing infrastructure complexity behind it have also resulted in the need for new technology and IT skillsets to effectively manage networks and systems.

- More than 50% of those surveyed said information security and cloud computing top the list of IT skillsets that will grow in demand over the next 3-5 years, followed by virtualization

- Respondents said information security is the IT role that will need to adapt the most to evolving technology over the next 3-5 years

- Cloud computing ranked as the most important technology for businesses to invest in today to remain competitive for the next 3-5 years, followed closely by mobility, virtualization (server or desktop), data analytics and BYOx, respectively

The survey was conducted from November 12-18, 2013, resulting in 298 survey responses from IT practitioners, managers and directors in the US and Canada from public- and private-sector small, mid-size and enterprise companies.

Suaad Sait is EVP Products and Markets at SolarWinds.

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Business Decisions: The Evolving Role of the Modern IT Professional

Suaad Sait

Increasing infrastructure complexity has affected the role of nearly all IT professionals, creating the need for new skillsets, including the ability to help companies make informed, strategic business decisions, according to the SolarWinds New IT Survey, which sheds light on the evolving role of the modern IT professional in today’s technology-driven business environment.

While most IT professionals are at least some degree confident in their ability to provide such advice, more preparation is needed to feel completely confident.

The days of IT's limited impact on business are long gone, replaced by the modern era of almost complete reliance on technology and the incredibly complex infrastructure it brings with it. Something as simple as an incorrect server configuration can lead to loss of access to cloud-based applications and data, email server outages and ecommerce site shutdowns.

These and other IT issues can have tremendous negative impact on productivity and revenue generation. As a result, more businesses are starting to recognize that behind their success are teams of IT heroes that need to be involved in business-level decisions. Likewise, IT professionals need to be prepared to take on this new role.

Survey Findings:

Technology's rise in importance as a core business component may have only been outpaced by the complexity it created. This increasing infrastructure complexity has affected the role of nearly all IT professionals.

- Over half of all IT departments now manage virtualization, mobility, compliance, data analytics, SDN/virtual networks, BYOx, cloud computing and self-service automation

- 52% of respondents said increasing complexity has greatly affected their responsibilities over the past 3-5 years, and an additional 42% said it has somewhat affected their role

Foremost among the results of this evolution, modern IT professionals are now expected and must be prepared to help their companies make informed, strategic business decisions with regard to emerging technologies.

- 99% of respondents said they are given the opportunity to at least occasionally provide guidance and expertise necessary to help their companies make such decisions

- While 95% of survey-takers said they feel at least somewhat confident in their ability to provide such advice, only one-third of those are completely confident doing so

- To feel more empowered to provide such advice, slightly more than half of respondents said they need more training in their area(s) of responsibility, and nearly 40% said they need a better understanding of their companies’ overall business

In addition, this evolution of IT and the increasing infrastructure complexity behind it have also resulted in the need for new technology and IT skillsets to effectively manage networks and systems.

- More than 50% of those surveyed said information security and cloud computing top the list of IT skillsets that will grow in demand over the next 3-5 years, followed by virtualization

- Respondents said information security is the IT role that will need to adapt the most to evolving technology over the next 3-5 years

- Cloud computing ranked as the most important technology for businesses to invest in today to remain competitive for the next 3-5 years, followed closely by mobility, virtualization (server or desktop), data analytics and BYOx, respectively

The survey was conducted from November 12-18, 2013, resulting in 298 survey responses from IT practitioners, managers and directors in the US and Canada from public- and private-sector small, mid-size and enterprise companies.

Suaad Sait is EVP Products and Markets at SolarWinds.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...