Skip to main content

IT Leaders Identify Efficiency, Cloud and Analytics as Top 2015 Priorities

Steven Wastie

Nearly half of IT leadership and operations personnel identify improving operational efficiency as their number one near-term internal priority, and nearly one-third say big data analytics is their top deliverable goal, according to a survey by AppDynamics. Respondents also indicated a strong push into both public and private cloud, and nearly a quarter plan to implement container solutions in the next 12 months.

We’re seeing cloud picking up tremendous momentum. When you add together public and private, just about everybody is either building new applications or migrating existing ones to the cloud. That’s something we’ve been waiting to see for some time, as enterprises have built up their comfort levels with moving important applications out of their data centers.

The other area that’s getting serious traction is analytics. About 29 percent of IT professionals we surveyed said that delivering "big data analytics" to their organization is their number one priority. They are looking to harvest data from their applications that can contribute to real business insights. So these two areas of focus — cloud and analytics — are going to dominate 2015.

Also noteworthy from the survey is what emerging stage technologies IT professionals say they are pursuing, most notably, container solutions. Docker and other container solutions are big topics of conversation, and 24 percent say they have plans to use such a solution in the next 12 months.

Here are the main survey highlights:

■ 46% say “improving operational efficiency” is their IT department’s #1 priority

■ 29% say delivering big data analytics to their organization is their #1 priority

■ 26% are building new applications in a public cloud, and 17% are migrating existing applications to a public cloud

■ 34% are building new applications in a private cloud, and 20% are migrating existing applications to a private cloud

■ 76% say they have no plans to implement a container solution in the next 12 months or are not familiar with container solutions

Mobile continues to pose challenges for IT departments; 25 percent of respondents say they don’t have sufficient mobile application development resources, and 24 percent say security concerns are still a barrier to mobile app deployment.

This data points out two significant trends. One is that IT is looking to get the most out of its resources, as shown by the overwhelming prioritization of efficiency. The second is a push to deliver greater value to the business side of the enterprise through analytics.

The survey was conducted in the fourth quarter of 2014, with 193 respondents in IT leadership and operations roles who attended AppDynamics’ AppSphere users conference. The margin of error is +/-5.76% at a 95% confidence level.

Steven Wastie is Chief Marketing Officer of AppDynamics.

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

IT Leaders Identify Efficiency, Cloud and Analytics as Top 2015 Priorities

Steven Wastie

Nearly half of IT leadership and operations personnel identify improving operational efficiency as their number one near-term internal priority, and nearly one-third say big data analytics is their top deliverable goal, according to a survey by AppDynamics. Respondents also indicated a strong push into both public and private cloud, and nearly a quarter plan to implement container solutions in the next 12 months.

We’re seeing cloud picking up tremendous momentum. When you add together public and private, just about everybody is either building new applications or migrating existing ones to the cloud. That’s something we’ve been waiting to see for some time, as enterprises have built up their comfort levels with moving important applications out of their data centers.

The other area that’s getting serious traction is analytics. About 29 percent of IT professionals we surveyed said that delivering "big data analytics" to their organization is their number one priority. They are looking to harvest data from their applications that can contribute to real business insights. So these two areas of focus — cloud and analytics — are going to dominate 2015.

Also noteworthy from the survey is what emerging stage technologies IT professionals say they are pursuing, most notably, container solutions. Docker and other container solutions are big topics of conversation, and 24 percent say they have plans to use such a solution in the next 12 months.

Here are the main survey highlights:

■ 46% say “improving operational efficiency” is their IT department’s #1 priority

■ 29% say delivering big data analytics to their organization is their #1 priority

■ 26% are building new applications in a public cloud, and 17% are migrating existing applications to a public cloud

■ 34% are building new applications in a private cloud, and 20% are migrating existing applications to a private cloud

■ 76% say they have no plans to implement a container solution in the next 12 months or are not familiar with container solutions

Mobile continues to pose challenges for IT departments; 25 percent of respondents say they don’t have sufficient mobile application development resources, and 24 percent say security concerns are still a barrier to mobile app deployment.

This data points out two significant trends. One is that IT is looking to get the most out of its resources, as shown by the overwhelming prioritization of efficiency. The second is a push to deliver greater value to the business side of the enterprise through analytics.

The survey was conducted in the fourth quarter of 2014, with 193 respondents in IT leadership and operations roles who attended AppDynamics’ AppSphere users conference. The margin of error is +/-5.76% at a 95% confidence level.

Steven Wastie is Chief Marketing Officer of AppDynamics.

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...