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Network Complexity Redefines the IT Pro

Sanjay Castelino

Network complexity has defined a new competitive skillset for IT professionals, according to a new SolarWinds survey.

Driven by new technology combined with the evolving needs of IT Operations and Business Operations, the job of the IT pro is more complex than ever before.

These results are part of a wide-ranging survey of 225 US and Canada-based IT professionals, which was conducted last month in an effort to further understand the driving forces behind growing network complexity and to determine the skills IT professionals need to develop in order to stay competitive.

Over 92 percent of IT professionals said network complexity has either somewhat affected or greatly affected their role/responsibilities within the last three to five years.

Respondents indicated that the top contributing network complexity drivers across Technology, IT Operations and Business Operations were:

- Technology – smarter/more complex equipment, compute virtualization and SDN

- IT Operations – BYOD and mobility

- Business Operations – security

Network complexity is driven by many factors, both real and perceived. Two great examples are SDN, which promises to change the way networking is done in the future but is still a nascent technology, and security, a far more present and tangible problem for IT pros today. However, like other factors, IT pros know that change is a matter of life in this industry, and they are focused on trying to manage these drivers to help their businesses thrive.”

While most IT professionals generally agree that higher education sufficiently prepared them for their current role, over 70 percent said their company needs to train IT staff to be as prepared as possible for growing network complexity.

Network Complexity skillsets needed today: Over one-quarter of IT professionals surveyed said understanding of the business is the single most important skillset needed to combat the challenges of network complexity, followed closely by network engineering and information security.

Network Complexity skillsets needed in five years: When IT pros look five years into the future to determine what will be the single most important skillset needed to combat the future challenges of network complexity, information security surpasses understanding of the business – cloud, or SaaS also moved up on the radar of those surveyed.

Just as networks become more dynamic, so does the role of the IT professional. Wide-ranging network complexity drivers like BYOD, mobility and security are making a real impact on how IT pros manage their environments, suggesting that the IT pro with the broadest, most comprehensive set of skills will be better equipped than an IT specialist to tackle growing network complexity.

The survey was conducted from May 23-28, 2013, resulting in 225 survey responses from IT practitioners, managers and directors in the US and Canada from public- and private-sector small, mid-size and enterprise companies. SolarWinds will be releasing additional survey data in the coming weeks on IT professionals in the UK, Australia, Germany and Brazil.

Sanjay Castelino is Vice President of Product Marketing at SolarWinds.

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Network Complexity Redefines the IT Pro

Sanjay Castelino

Network complexity has defined a new competitive skillset for IT professionals, according to a new SolarWinds survey.

Driven by new technology combined with the evolving needs of IT Operations and Business Operations, the job of the IT pro is more complex than ever before.

These results are part of a wide-ranging survey of 225 US and Canada-based IT professionals, which was conducted last month in an effort to further understand the driving forces behind growing network complexity and to determine the skills IT professionals need to develop in order to stay competitive.

Over 92 percent of IT professionals said network complexity has either somewhat affected or greatly affected their role/responsibilities within the last three to five years.

Respondents indicated that the top contributing network complexity drivers across Technology, IT Operations and Business Operations were:

- Technology – smarter/more complex equipment, compute virtualization and SDN

- IT Operations – BYOD and mobility

- Business Operations – security

Network complexity is driven by many factors, both real and perceived. Two great examples are SDN, which promises to change the way networking is done in the future but is still a nascent technology, and security, a far more present and tangible problem for IT pros today. However, like other factors, IT pros know that change is a matter of life in this industry, and they are focused on trying to manage these drivers to help their businesses thrive.”

While most IT professionals generally agree that higher education sufficiently prepared them for their current role, over 70 percent said their company needs to train IT staff to be as prepared as possible for growing network complexity.

Network Complexity skillsets needed today: Over one-quarter of IT professionals surveyed said understanding of the business is the single most important skillset needed to combat the challenges of network complexity, followed closely by network engineering and information security.

Network Complexity skillsets needed in five years: When IT pros look five years into the future to determine what will be the single most important skillset needed to combat the future challenges of network complexity, information security surpasses understanding of the business – cloud, or SaaS also moved up on the radar of those surveyed.

Just as networks become more dynamic, so does the role of the IT professional. Wide-ranging network complexity drivers like BYOD, mobility and security are making a real impact on how IT pros manage their environments, suggesting that the IT pro with the broadest, most comprehensive set of skills will be better equipped than an IT specialist to tackle growing network complexity.

The survey was conducted from May 23-28, 2013, resulting in 225 survey responses from IT practitioners, managers and directors in the US and Canada from public- and private-sector small, mid-size and enterprise companies. SolarWinds will be releasing additional survey data in the coming weeks on IT professionals in the UK, Australia, Germany and Brazil.

Sanjay Castelino is Vice President of Product Marketing at SolarWinds.

Hot Topics

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 ...