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IT Pros Want AI and AIOps but Are Concerned About Data Quality

Despite a near-unanimous desire to adopt AI technology, very few respondents have confidence in their organization's readiness to integrate AI, pointing to limitations in data and infrastructure and security concerns, according to the 2024 IT Trends Report, AI: Friend or Foe?, based on a survey of nearly 700 IT professionals conducted by SolarWinds.

The report found that while IT pros have a growing interest in embracing AI technology, with nine out of ten already using or planning to use AI, concerns remain about data quality, database infrastructure readiness, and — above all else — security and privacy.

"While talk of AI has dominated the industry, IT leaders and teams recognize the outsize risks of the still-developing technology, heightened by the rush to build AI quickly rather than smartly," said Krishna Sai, SVP, Technology and Engineering at SolarWinds. "With the proper internal systems in place and by prioritizing security, fairness, and transparency while building AI, these technologies can serve as a valuable advisor and coworker to overworked teams, but this survey shows that IT pros need to be consulted as their companies invest in AI."

Overall, the industry's sentiment reflects cautious optimism about AI despite the obstacles. Almost half of IT professionals (46%) want their company to move faster in implementing AI despite costs, challenges, and concerns, but only 43% are confident that their company's databases can meet the increased needs of AI. Moreover, even fewer (38%) trust the quality of data or training used in developing AI technologies.

The report unveiled significant insights into IT professionals' perspectives on AI, including:

AIOps Drives Efficiency and Productivity

IT pros cited AIOps as the AI technology that will have the most significant positive impact on their role (31%), ranking above large language models and machine learning. More than a third of respondents (38%) said their companies already use AI to make IT operations more efficient and effective.


Source: SolarWinds

Distrust of Data Powering AI

Only 38% of respondents are very trusting of the data quality and training used in AI technologies, and rank data quality as a major barrier to AI adoption, second only to security and privacy risks. Because of this, today's IT teams see AI as an advisor (33%) and a sidekick (20%) rather than a solo decision-maker.

Privacy and Security Concerns Are Barriers to AI Adoption

Respondents overwhelmingly named privacy and security concerns as the most significant barrier to AI integration. When asked about their challenges with AI, four out of 10 (41%) respondents said they've had negative experiences. Of those, privacy concerns (48%) and security risks (43%) were most often cited as the reasons why.

IT Pros Call for Government Regulation

IT pros specifically call for increased government regulations to address security (72%) and privacy (64%). More than half of respondents also believe government regulation should play a role in combating misinformation, as training AI models — including data quality — is a matter of both ethics and security.

To ensure successful and secure AI adoption, IT pros recognize that organizations must develop thorough policies on ethics, data privacy, and compliance, pointing to ethical considerations and concerns about job displacement as other significant barriers to AI adoption. The report found that more than a third of organizations (35.6%) still don't have these policies in place to guide proper AI implementation.

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For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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IT Pros Want AI and AIOps but Are Concerned About Data Quality

Despite a near-unanimous desire to adopt AI technology, very few respondents have confidence in their organization's readiness to integrate AI, pointing to limitations in data and infrastructure and security concerns, according to the 2024 IT Trends Report, AI: Friend or Foe?, based on a survey of nearly 700 IT professionals conducted by SolarWinds.

The report found that while IT pros have a growing interest in embracing AI technology, with nine out of ten already using or planning to use AI, concerns remain about data quality, database infrastructure readiness, and — above all else — security and privacy.

"While talk of AI has dominated the industry, IT leaders and teams recognize the outsize risks of the still-developing technology, heightened by the rush to build AI quickly rather than smartly," said Krishna Sai, SVP, Technology and Engineering at SolarWinds. "With the proper internal systems in place and by prioritizing security, fairness, and transparency while building AI, these technologies can serve as a valuable advisor and coworker to overworked teams, but this survey shows that IT pros need to be consulted as their companies invest in AI."

Overall, the industry's sentiment reflects cautious optimism about AI despite the obstacles. Almost half of IT professionals (46%) want their company to move faster in implementing AI despite costs, challenges, and concerns, but only 43% are confident that their company's databases can meet the increased needs of AI. Moreover, even fewer (38%) trust the quality of data or training used in developing AI technologies.

The report unveiled significant insights into IT professionals' perspectives on AI, including:

AIOps Drives Efficiency and Productivity

IT pros cited AIOps as the AI technology that will have the most significant positive impact on their role (31%), ranking above large language models and machine learning. More than a third of respondents (38%) said their companies already use AI to make IT operations more efficient and effective.


Source: SolarWinds

Distrust of Data Powering AI

Only 38% of respondents are very trusting of the data quality and training used in AI technologies, and rank data quality as a major barrier to AI adoption, second only to security and privacy risks. Because of this, today's IT teams see AI as an advisor (33%) and a sidekick (20%) rather than a solo decision-maker.

Privacy and Security Concerns Are Barriers to AI Adoption

Respondents overwhelmingly named privacy and security concerns as the most significant barrier to AI integration. When asked about their challenges with AI, four out of 10 (41%) respondents said they've had negative experiences. Of those, privacy concerns (48%) and security risks (43%) were most often cited as the reasons why.

IT Pros Call for Government Regulation

IT pros specifically call for increased government regulations to address security (72%) and privacy (64%). More than half of respondents also believe government regulation should play a role in combating misinformation, as training AI models — including data quality — is a matter of both ethics and security.

To ensure successful and secure AI adoption, IT pros recognize that organizations must develop thorough policies on ethics, data privacy, and compliance, pointing to ethical considerations and concerns about job displacement as other significant barriers to AI adoption. The report found that more than a third of organizations (35.6%) still don't have these policies in place to guide proper AI implementation.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...