Skip to main content

IT Managers in the UAE Say: Lack of Unified Observability Restricts Ability to Meet Business Requirements

More than Half of UAE Survey Respondents Believe that Unified Observability Would Enhance their Ability to Provide Flawless Digital Experiences
Mike Marks
Riverbed

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.

Mike Marks is VP of Product Marketing at Riverbed

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 ...

IT Managers in the UAE Say: Lack of Unified Observability Restricts Ability to Meet Business Requirements

More than Half of UAE Survey Respondents Believe that Unified Observability Would Enhance their Ability to Provide Flawless Digital Experiences
Mike Marks
Riverbed

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.

Mike Marks is VP of Product Marketing at Riverbed

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 ...