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IT Must Adapt to BYOx

Lawrence Garvin

Consumerization of IT, namely the emergence of BYOx (where x is anything from apps, data to the latest mobile devices), is having a significant impact on business operations and the strategic implementation of emerging technologies, according to the New IT Survey conducted by SolarWinds.

One in four survey respondents indicated that BYOx is the emerging technology most likely to cause disruption, in terms of its impact on the business and the time and energy IT professionals dedicate to solving related issues. The results also reveal that IT professionals are playing an increasingly valuable role in the strategic decisions that lead to the implementation of such emerging technologies, with 97% of those surveyed being relied upon to extend their responsibilities and make informed business decisions.

The days of IT's limited impact on business are long gone, replaced by the modern era of almost complete reliance on technology, especially the emerging technologies that threaten to disrupt the status quo. The shifting expectations from employees, who want to use consumer devices and applications in the workplace, are leaving an indelible mark on business processes.

As a result, more businesses recognize that IT holds an important key to success, particularly when it comes to the implementation of disruptive technologies. Likewise, IT professionals can no longer be content to stay within their traditional role. Instead, they must be prepared to take on new levels of responsibility within strategic business initiatives.

Fielded in November 2013, the survey yielded responses from 214 IT practitioners, managers and directors in the UK from small, mid-size and enterprise companies.

Survey Findings:

The evolution of technology means that IT professionals must adapt their skill-sets and levels of responsibility in order to cope with the demands of emerging and disruptive technologies.

- One in four of those surveyed suggested that BYOx is the emerging technology that is most disruptive to business

- Mobility, cloud computing, data analytics and compliance round up the top five emerging technologies

- Over 50% of respondents suggest that cloud/SaaS and information security are the top IT skill-sets that will be in high demand over the next 3-5 years, followed by mobile apps and device management

Foremost among the results of this evolution, modern IT professionals are now expected and must be prepared to help their companies make informed, strategic business decisions with regard to emerging technologies.

- 97% of all IT pros are confident that they can provide the guidance and expertise necessary to help their company make informed decisions with regards to emerging technologies

- While 97% of survey-takers said they feel at least somewhat confident in their ability to provide such advice, only one-third of those are completely confident in doing so

- To feel more empowered to provide strategic advice, slightly more than half of respondents said they need more training in their area(s) of responsibility, and nearly 40% said they need a better understanding of their company's overall business

Technology's rise in importance as a core business component may have only been outpaced by the complexity it created. This increasing infrastructure complexity has affected the role of nearly all IT professionals.

- Over half (53%) of all IT departments now manage virtualization, mobility, compliance, data analytics, SDN/virtual networks, BYOx, cloud computing and self-service automation

- 40% of respondents said increasing complexity has greatly affected their responsibilities over the past 3-5 years, and an additional 49% said it has somewhat affected their role

About the survey: The survey was conducted from November 12-18, 2013, resulting in 214 survey responses from IT practitioners, managers and directors in the UK from small, mid-size and enterprise companies.

Lawrence Garvin is a Head Geek and Technical Product Marketing Manager at SolarWinds.

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IT Must Adapt to BYOx

Lawrence Garvin

Consumerization of IT, namely the emergence of BYOx (where x is anything from apps, data to the latest mobile devices), is having a significant impact on business operations and the strategic implementation of emerging technologies, according to the New IT Survey conducted by SolarWinds.

One in four survey respondents indicated that BYOx is the emerging technology most likely to cause disruption, in terms of its impact on the business and the time and energy IT professionals dedicate to solving related issues. The results also reveal that IT professionals are playing an increasingly valuable role in the strategic decisions that lead to the implementation of such emerging technologies, with 97% of those surveyed being relied upon to extend their responsibilities and make informed business decisions.

The days of IT's limited impact on business are long gone, replaced by the modern era of almost complete reliance on technology, especially the emerging technologies that threaten to disrupt the status quo. The shifting expectations from employees, who want to use consumer devices and applications in the workplace, are leaving an indelible mark on business processes.

As a result, more businesses recognize that IT holds an important key to success, particularly when it comes to the implementation of disruptive technologies. Likewise, IT professionals can no longer be content to stay within their traditional role. Instead, they must be prepared to take on new levels of responsibility within strategic business initiatives.

Fielded in November 2013, the survey yielded responses from 214 IT practitioners, managers and directors in the UK from small, mid-size and enterprise companies.

Survey Findings:

The evolution of technology means that IT professionals must adapt their skill-sets and levels of responsibility in order to cope with the demands of emerging and disruptive technologies.

- One in four of those surveyed suggested that BYOx is the emerging technology that is most disruptive to business

- Mobility, cloud computing, data analytics and compliance round up the top five emerging technologies

- Over 50% of respondents suggest that cloud/SaaS and information security are the top IT skill-sets that will be in high demand over the next 3-5 years, followed by mobile apps and device management

Foremost among the results of this evolution, modern IT professionals are now expected and must be prepared to help their companies make informed, strategic business decisions with regard to emerging technologies.

- 97% of all IT pros are confident that they can provide the guidance and expertise necessary to help their company make informed decisions with regards to emerging technologies

- While 97% of survey-takers said they feel at least somewhat confident in their ability to provide such advice, only one-third of those are completely confident in doing so

- To feel more empowered to provide strategic advice, slightly more than half of respondents said they need more training in their area(s) of responsibility, and nearly 40% said they need a better understanding of their company's overall business

Technology's rise in importance as a core business component may have only been outpaced by the complexity it created. This increasing infrastructure complexity has affected the role of nearly all IT professionals.

- Over half (53%) of all IT departments now manage virtualization, mobility, compliance, data analytics, SDN/virtual networks, BYOx, cloud computing and self-service automation

- 40% of respondents said increasing complexity has greatly affected their responsibilities over the past 3-5 years, and an additional 49% said it has somewhat affected their role

About the survey: The survey was conducted from November 12-18, 2013, resulting in 214 survey responses from IT practitioners, managers and directors in the UK from small, mid-size and enterprise companies.

Lawrence Garvin is a Head Geek and Technical Product Marketing Manager at SolarWinds.

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The Latest

For fifteen years, observability lived downstream of everything else. Code shipped, something broke, an engineer went to the dashboards. The job was forensic. The pillars we built, such as logs, metrics, and traces, were designed for that role: tell a human what just happened, fast enough that they can make it stop. That role has quietly ended ...

Hybrid IT has become the standard operating model for enterprises — but that companies are still looking for the right hybrid IT mix, according to the 2026 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite. After years of cloud migration and hybrid adoption, organizations are shifting their focus from deciding whether to use cloud, colocation or on-premises infrastructure to determining which workloads belong in each environment ...

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...