A unified view of digital infrastructure is essential for IT teams that must improve the digital user experience while boosting overall organizational productivity, according to a survey of IT managers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), from Riverbed and market research firm IDC.

The UAE and other countries in the region have clear ambitions to significantly grow their digital economies in the next decade. However, the challenge of an increasingly strained IT talent pool is preventing them from providing the flawless digital experiences that underpin this important vision. The survey found that UAE IT teams need unified observability technology to give them the insight and visibility needed to boost customer experience and employee productivity as well as hasten digital transformation. This is especially important given that the survey revealed that 44% of UAE respondents agree that their organizations struggle to hire and retain highly skilled IT staff.

The survey further revealed that UAE IT teams are finding it difficult to effectively manage distributed digital infrastructures and deliver digital experiences that meet increasingly high customer expectations.

Other key findings include:

■ 93% of respondents currently use observability tools yet 55% of them believe those tools are too narrowly focused and fail to provide a complete and unified view of their organization’s operating conditions.

■ 53% said the lack of unified observability restricts the IT organization's ability to meet business requirements, and 52% said it makes their job and the job of their staff/peers more difficult.

■ 61% of respondents believe that their most well-trained IT staff spend too much time on tactical responsibilities, and 57% of respondents agree their organization needs to find ways to enable lower-skilled IT staff to find and fix issues.

■ 60% of organizations use six or more discrete tools for IT monitoring and measurement, and 59% said the tool limitations hold back productivity and collaboration.

■ 56% of organizations have difficulty analyzing correlations and 45% struggle to derive actionable insights.

As observability becomes the responsibility of C-level technology executives (CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, etc.), companies in the UAE are also investing more dollars in observability solutions. In the survey, 86% of UAE respondents said their observability budgets will rise in the next two years, and 41% said their budget will increase more than 25%.

UAE tech workers that must overcome increasingly complex IT environments and sprawling data as well as deliver more seamless and secure digital experiences to users everywhere are demanding new technologies that will help accelerate their performance and "do more with less" resources. In fact, many are gravitating to cloud-native, SaaS-delivered services that help them better address these challenges, such as resource constraints and data silos through AI and machine learning.

Methodology: IDC surveyed more than 1,400 IT professionals from across 10 countries on the current and future state of observability. The survey respondents came from seven industries (financial, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, technology, government, and professional services). Over 75% of respondents represented large enterprises (1000+ employees) and 70% held Director or above positions within their respective IT organizations. All had managerial responsibility for observability and/or IT performance management functions, use, staff, and budgets.