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Hybrid Cloud Is Here to Stay – and IT Leaders Are (Mostly) Missing the Tools They Need to Succeed

James Field
LogicMonitor

It won't come as a surprise to IT managers, but an alarming number of them describe their company's monitoring approach as "chaotic." According to a recent survey of over 500 global IT leaders, the challenges plaguing IT teams are significant, as they navigate everything from economic constraints, demands AI puts on their tech stack, and competing job priorities from senior leadership.

What Is the Problem?

The overwhelming majority of IT leaders (80%) say budget cuts are negatively impacting their company's cloud migration. At the same time, nearly the same amount (71%) say they expect to be working with a mix of both cloud and on-prem infrastructure — and all of them (100%) think it's best for business. It's clear that hybrid isn't going anywhere.

So what's the problem?

Almost half of IT leaders have only negative things to say about their company's current hybrid monitoring approach — contributing to that "chaotic" environment. And maybe most alarmingly, the majority (74%) of IT managers spend more than a full day each week responding to incidents. Giving IT teams that time back not only makes employees happier, but helps a businesses' bottom line. More on that later.

Where AI Fits In

We know artificial intelligence is absolutely everywhere these days — including on IT leaders' minds. Surprisingly, only 50% think that their organization's infrastructure is prepared to handle additional use of AI. Even worse: only 17% say their company's IT infrastructure completely supports business goals. This should be a wakeup call for the C-suite to listen to the concerns of their IT teams so they aren't hamstrung by tech capabilities when it comes time to implement AI tools.

They do have a wishlist, though. IT leaders mostly want AI to provide recommendations for actions they can take to solve incidents (taking a chunk out of that one day per week that they already spend responding), and ideally, recognize and resolve issues on its own. AIOps is heating up as an industry, so luckily for IT teams, this reality isn't far away.

The Big Picture: Helping IT Leaders Make an Impact

The IT teams I've worked with throughout my career have always been extremely impressive. They're committed to their work, steeped in the details, and they keep an eye on the bottom line and care deeply about how their work supports it. I was not surprised to see this is true of most IT leaders, too – 74% have ideas about how to solve business problems using their data, but no time to develop them.

These findings should alert company leadership that more needs to be done (cough cough, better tools!) to give IT leaders more job satisfaction, as 65% of them say they're happiest at work when they have interesting, innovative work to do. Freeing up their time is also imperative for the business: 40% have put off projects that increase user and customer satisfaction to focus on responding to incidents, and 35% say they put off increasing revenue. Talk about a missed opportunity.

All of this to say: heed the concerns of your IT people, and results — everything from job satisfaction to company performance — will follow.

James Field is Sr. Director of Product Strategy and Operations at LogicMonitor

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Hybrid Cloud Is Here to Stay – and IT Leaders Are (Mostly) Missing the Tools They Need to Succeed

James Field
LogicMonitor

It won't come as a surprise to IT managers, but an alarming number of them describe their company's monitoring approach as "chaotic." According to a recent survey of over 500 global IT leaders, the challenges plaguing IT teams are significant, as they navigate everything from economic constraints, demands AI puts on their tech stack, and competing job priorities from senior leadership.

What Is the Problem?

The overwhelming majority of IT leaders (80%) say budget cuts are negatively impacting their company's cloud migration. At the same time, nearly the same amount (71%) say they expect to be working with a mix of both cloud and on-prem infrastructure — and all of them (100%) think it's best for business. It's clear that hybrid isn't going anywhere.

So what's the problem?

Almost half of IT leaders have only negative things to say about their company's current hybrid monitoring approach — contributing to that "chaotic" environment. And maybe most alarmingly, the majority (74%) of IT managers spend more than a full day each week responding to incidents. Giving IT teams that time back not only makes employees happier, but helps a businesses' bottom line. More on that later.

Where AI Fits In

We know artificial intelligence is absolutely everywhere these days — including on IT leaders' minds. Surprisingly, only 50% think that their organization's infrastructure is prepared to handle additional use of AI. Even worse: only 17% say their company's IT infrastructure completely supports business goals. This should be a wakeup call for the C-suite to listen to the concerns of their IT teams so they aren't hamstrung by tech capabilities when it comes time to implement AI tools.

They do have a wishlist, though. IT leaders mostly want AI to provide recommendations for actions they can take to solve incidents (taking a chunk out of that one day per week that they already spend responding), and ideally, recognize and resolve issues on its own. AIOps is heating up as an industry, so luckily for IT teams, this reality isn't far away.

The Big Picture: Helping IT Leaders Make an Impact

The IT teams I've worked with throughout my career have always been extremely impressive. They're committed to their work, steeped in the details, and they keep an eye on the bottom line and care deeply about how their work supports it. I was not surprised to see this is true of most IT leaders, too – 74% have ideas about how to solve business problems using their data, but no time to develop them.

These findings should alert company leadership that more needs to be done (cough cough, better tools!) to give IT leaders more job satisfaction, as 65% of them say they're happiest at work when they have interesting, innovative work to do. Freeing up their time is also imperative for the business: 40% have put off projects that increase user and customer satisfaction to focus on responding to incidents, and 35% say they put off increasing revenue. Talk about a missed opportunity.

All of this to say: heed the concerns of your IT people, and results — everything from job satisfaction to company performance — will follow.

James Field is Sr. Director of Product Strategy and Operations at LogicMonitor

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...