IT Professionals Day 2018: A World Powered by Tech Pros

Leon Adato
Learn more about SolarWinds

As our world grows increasingly complex, and digital transformation remains top of mind for businesses in every industry, technology professionals are working around the clock. Tech pros work tirelessly to solve any problem thrown their way, no matter the issue's size — from helping an individual send a large file, to patching critical enterprise vulnerabilities, to solving latency issues beyond the firewall, or fixing application performance problems, technology professionals are often the unsung heroes of modern business.

While we certainly appreciate IT pros year-round, there is often a lack of understanding by business leaders and end users as to just how critical their responsibilities are, and the complexities associated with their day-to-day roles. The problem is, the job is never done. In fact, tech professionals have so much on their plates that the 2018 SolarWinds IT Trends Report: The Intersection of Hype & Performance found that over half of all tech pros surveyed spend less than 25 percent of their time on proactive optimization of their environments. But, what if that wasn't the case? 

Make sure to thank a tech pro on September 18 to acknowledge the ways that they make your day-to-day life better

To celebrate IT Professionals Day 2018 (this year on September 18), SolarWinds commissioned its fourth annual survey to empower technology professionals with the freedom to think bigger than their day-to-day tasks. The SolarWinds IT Pro Day 2018: A World Powered by Tech Pros survey explores a "Tech PROactive" world where technology professionals have the time, resources, and ability to use their technology prowess to do absolutely anything — from improving their IT environments, to addressing global societal challenges, and even enhancing their personal lives (turns out, virtual reality can work magic at work and at home).

A comprehensive look at the findings show us a glimpse into technology professionals' biggest IT ambitions. In a world powered by technology professionals ...

End users are the top priority

■ Nearly 70% of tech pros surveyed respond to one-off user requests on a daily basis.

■ Over half (51%) of tech pros respond to help desk tickets on a daily basis.

■ Even when they have time to be proactive at work, researching new technologies that will benefit the end user is still the number one priority (by weighted rank).

AI, machine learning, deep learning, and cloud transform IT environments

Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, deep learning, and cloud computing would not only transform IT environments, but the greater good, according to respondents.

■ The top three new technology advancements that tech pros would use to solve challenges within their IT environment, if they had more time, would be:

1. AI/machine learning/deep learning
2. Automation
3. Cloud (by weighted rank, respectively)

■ Technology professionals say they would use these technologies to:

1. Uncover more actionable insights for business leadership
2. Make repeatable tasks quicker and more accurate
3. Scale easily and cost effectively by using the public cloud

■ The top three technology advancements that tech pros would use to solve broader societal issues, if they had more time to do so, would be:

1. AI/machine learning/deep learning
2. Big data analysis
3. Cloud (by weighted rank, respectively)

■ Technology professionals say they would use these technologies to pursue two main societal challenges:

1. Affordable education, housing, and healthcare for all
2. Environmental and sustainability initiatives

Personal development is top of mind

Personal development is top of mind but requires a time commitment outside the traditional workday.

The top three work-related activities that tech pros would spend their time on if they had one extra hour in the workday:

■ Developing a skillset (41%)

■ Researching new technologies (21%)

■ Planning/strategizing future technology innovation in your IT environment (19%)

IT prowess would also power personal lives

The top three areas outside of work that tech pros would use technology to enhance (by weighted rank):

1. Home DIY projects: Such as using virtual reality (VR) to visualize a kitchen remodel before implementing changes.

2. Managing finances: By using machine learning (ML) to grow investments and diversify their portfolio.

3. Vacation planning: Such as utilizing cloud-based services to store and link travel data, and using IoT-based devices to generate real-time insights while on the go.

In our IT Professionals Day 2017 survey, Little-Known IT Pro Facts, it became clear that technology professionals are the backbone of our businesses. The 2018 survey shows that this trend has continued, and envisions technology pros' ambition to better the workplace, the world, and their personal lives through the use of technology.

Make sure to thank a tech pro on September 18, or any day, to acknowledge the ways that they make your day-to-day life better.

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IT Professionals Day 2018: A World Powered by Tech Pros

Leon Adato
Learn more about SolarWinds

As our world grows increasingly complex, and digital transformation remains top of mind for businesses in every industry, technology professionals are working around the clock. Tech pros work tirelessly to solve any problem thrown their way, no matter the issue's size — from helping an individual send a large file, to patching critical enterprise vulnerabilities, to solving latency issues beyond the firewall, or fixing application performance problems, technology professionals are often the unsung heroes of modern business.

While we certainly appreciate IT pros year-round, there is often a lack of understanding by business leaders and end users as to just how critical their responsibilities are, and the complexities associated with their day-to-day roles. The problem is, the job is never done. In fact, tech professionals have so much on their plates that the 2018 SolarWinds IT Trends Report: The Intersection of Hype & Performance found that over half of all tech pros surveyed spend less than 25 percent of their time on proactive optimization of their environments. But, what if that wasn't the case? 

Make sure to thank a tech pro on September 18 to acknowledge the ways that they make your day-to-day life better

To celebrate IT Professionals Day 2018 (this year on September 18), SolarWinds commissioned its fourth annual survey to empower technology professionals with the freedom to think bigger than their day-to-day tasks. The SolarWinds IT Pro Day 2018: A World Powered by Tech Pros survey explores a "Tech PROactive" world where technology professionals have the time, resources, and ability to use their technology prowess to do absolutely anything — from improving their IT environments, to addressing global societal challenges, and even enhancing their personal lives (turns out, virtual reality can work magic at work and at home).

A comprehensive look at the findings show us a glimpse into technology professionals' biggest IT ambitions. In a world powered by technology professionals ...

End users are the top priority

■ Nearly 70% of tech pros surveyed respond to one-off user requests on a daily basis.

■ Over half (51%) of tech pros respond to help desk tickets on a daily basis.

■ Even when they have time to be proactive at work, researching new technologies that will benefit the end user is still the number one priority (by weighted rank).

AI, machine learning, deep learning, and cloud transform IT environments

Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, deep learning, and cloud computing would not only transform IT environments, but the greater good, according to respondents.

■ The top three new technology advancements that tech pros would use to solve challenges within their IT environment, if they had more time, would be:

1. AI/machine learning/deep learning
2. Automation
3. Cloud (by weighted rank, respectively)

■ Technology professionals say they would use these technologies to:

1. Uncover more actionable insights for business leadership
2. Make repeatable tasks quicker and more accurate
3. Scale easily and cost effectively by using the public cloud

■ The top three technology advancements that tech pros would use to solve broader societal issues, if they had more time to do so, would be:

1. AI/machine learning/deep learning
2. Big data analysis
3. Cloud (by weighted rank, respectively)

■ Technology professionals say they would use these technologies to pursue two main societal challenges:

1. Affordable education, housing, and healthcare for all
2. Environmental and sustainability initiatives

Personal development is top of mind

Personal development is top of mind but requires a time commitment outside the traditional workday.

The top three work-related activities that tech pros would spend their time on if they had one extra hour in the workday:

■ Developing a skillset (41%)

■ Researching new technologies (21%)

■ Planning/strategizing future technology innovation in your IT environment (19%)

IT prowess would also power personal lives

The top three areas outside of work that tech pros would use technology to enhance (by weighted rank):

1. Home DIY projects: Such as using virtual reality (VR) to visualize a kitchen remodel before implementing changes.

2. Managing finances: By using machine learning (ML) to grow investments and diversify their portfolio.

3. Vacation planning: Such as utilizing cloud-based services to store and link travel data, and using IoT-based devices to generate real-time insights while on the go.

In our IT Professionals Day 2017 survey, Little-Known IT Pro Facts, it became clear that technology professionals are the backbone of our businesses. The 2018 survey shows that this trend has continued, and envisions technology pros' ambition to better the workplace, the world, and their personal lives through the use of technology.

Make sure to thank a tech pro on September 18, or any day, to acknowledge the ways that they make your day-to-day life better.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

Agentic Remediation: Capitalizing on the New Era of Database Observability

Developers building AI applications are not just looking for fault patterns after deployment; they must detect issues quickly during development and have the ability to prevent issues after going live. Unfortunately, traditional observability tools can no longer meet the needs of AI-driven enterprise application development. AI-powered detection and auto-remediation tools designed to keep pace with rapid development are now emerging to proactively manage performance and prevent downtime ...

ZTNA 101: Common Misconceptions That Keep Companies From Adopting It

Every few years, the cybersecurity industry adopts a new buzzword. "Zero Trust" has endured longer than most — and for good reason. Its promise is simple: trust nothing by default, verify everything continuously. Yet many organizations still hesitate to implement Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). The problem isn't that ZTNA doesn't work. It's that it's often misunderstood ...

When Dashboards Say "Green" But Customers See Red: Why Digital Experience Still Fails at the Last Mile

For many retail brands, peak season is the annual stress test of their digital infrastructure. It's also when often technical dashboards glow green, yet customer feedback, digital experience frustration, and conversion trends tell a different story entirely. Over the past several years, we've seen the same pattern across retail, financial services, travel, and media: internal application performance metrics fail to capture the true experience of users connecting over local broadband, mobile carriers, and congested networks using multiple devices across geographies ...

Don't Fall Into These 5 PostgreSQL Traps

PostgreSQL promises greater flexibility, performance, and cost savings compared to proprietary alternatives. But successfully deploying it isn't always straightforward, and there are some hidden traps along the way that even seasoned IT leaders can stumble into. In this blog, I'll highlight five of the most common pitfalls with PostgreSQL deployment and offer guidance on how to avoid them, along with the best path forward ...

Why AI Is No Longer Optional for IT Operations

The rise of hybrid cloud environments, the explosion of IoT devices, the proliferation of remote work, and advanced cyber threats have created a monitoring challenge that traditional approaches simply cannot meet. IT teams find themselves drowning in a sea of data, struggling to identify critical threats amidst a deluge of alerts, and often reacting to incidents long after they've begun. This is where AI and ML are leveraged ...

Outages Aren't the Enemy, Complacency Is

Three practices, chaos testing, incident retrospectives, and AIOps-driven monitoring, are transforming platform teams from reactive responders into proactive builders of resilient, self-healing systems. The evolution is not just technical; it's cultural. The modern platform engineer isn't just maintaining infrastructure. They're product owners designing for reliability, observability, and continuous improvement ...

The Changing World of Application Delivery (and why it pays to have choices)

Getting applications into the hands of those who need them quickly and securely has long been the goal of a branch of IT often referred to as End User Computing (EUC). Over recent years, the way applications (and data) have been delivered to these "users" has changed noticeably. Organizations have many more choices available to them now, and there will be more to come ... But how did we get here? Where are we going? Is this all too complicated? ...

When a Metadata Change Broke the Internet: What the Cloudflare Outage Really Revealed

On November 18, a single database permission change inside Cloudflare set off a chain of failures that rippled across the Internet. Traffic stalled. Authentication broke. Workers KV returned waves of 5xx errors as systems fell in and out of sync. For nearly three hours, one of the most resilient networks on the planet struggled under the weight of a change no one expected to matter ... Cloudflare recovered quickly, but the deeper lesson reaches far beyond this incident ...

Cybersecurity Awesomeness Podcast: Cloudflare Outage

Chris Steffen and Ken Buckler from EMA discuss the Cloudflare outage and what availability means in the technology space ...

When Milliseconds Matter: What Every Industry Can Learn From the Self-Driving Playbook

Every modern industry is confronting the same challenge: human reaction time is no longer fast enough for real-time decision environments. Across sectors, from financial services to manufacturing to cybersecurity and beyond, the stakes mirror those of autonomous vehicles — systems operating in complex, high-risk environments where milliseconds matter ...