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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

For fifteen years, observability lived downstream of everything else. Code shipped, something broke, an engineer went to the dashboards. The job was forensic. The pillars we built, such as logs, metrics, and traces, were designed for that role: tell a human what just happened, fast enough that they can make it stop. That role has quietly ended ...

Hybrid IT has become the standard operating model for enterprises — but that companies are still looking for the right hybrid IT mix, according to the 2026 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite. After years of cloud migration and hybrid adoption, organizations are shifting their focus from deciding whether to use cloud, colocation or on-premises infrastructure to determining which workloads belong in each environment ...

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...