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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

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 ...