Today’s IT teams are tasked with navigating an extremely agile business landscape, oftentimes creating environments that are very complex as IT practices, systems, and infrastructure are being radically transformed with new waves of technology. In fact, Ipswitch recently released a report, The Challenges of Controlling IT Complexity, that reveals IT teams feel they are at risk of losing control of their company’s IT environment in the face of these new technologies. But what exactly is it about these new technologies that is vexing today’s IT teams? A deeper dive into the research uncovers two major themes that teams are grappling with to better manage increasing IT complexity.
IT Teams Are Concerned About Losing Control of Business Transactions, Applications and Infrastructure Due to Increasing Complexity
IT complexity is simply making it more difficult for today’s teams to do their jobs successfully (66 percent of respondents feel this way).
This is of particular concern because many of the IT applications that require an organization to be successful in today’s modern business landscape are the ones giving teams the most cause for worry: efficiently managing mobile devices and wireless networks, cloud applications, virtualization, BYOD, and monitoring applications that eat up a great deal of bandwidth, such as video or streaming.
IT teams especially feel that they are forced to do more with less with each of these burgeoning technological advancements, which does nothing to help teams stay focused on keeping their organizations running smoothly.
IT Teams Need Better IT Management Software
It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that the majority of IT teams (88 percent) want IT management software that offers more monitoring flexibility, with fewer restrictions, and at no additional cost – especially at a time when teams (54 percent) find IT management software licensing models are too expensive, inflexible and complicated to deal with. This makes sense given the complexity they have to manage and the lack of effectiveness of current solutions.
But come to find out, IT teams don’t know where to begin to find those solutions that work for them – and it’s not because they aren’t aware of what’s available to them, rather it’s because they are faced with the constraints of smaller budgets, less time, fewer resources, higher expectations and an accelerating stream of new technologies to learn and implement, all while manning the front lines of their networks at the same time.
More often than not, IT teams end up using more than 3 tools to monitor their networks, with many organizations using even up to 10 to 20 tools. This results in IT professionals spending too much time switching between tools to try to get an accurate view into their application and infrastructure performance, which is time and effort that could be used elsewhere if they had a solution that would make it easier to have a holistic view of their IT environment.
The bottom line: with the pressure of increasing complexity, IT teams are looking for better IT management tools that enable them to securely control their environment and ensure 24/7 uptime and performance. Modern IT teams need powerful and easy to try, buy and use IT management solutions that are both flexible and affordable so that they can simply get their jobs done, and get them done right.
Jeff Loeb is CMO at Ipswitch.
