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Taking Down the Top IT Management Challenges for 2017

Sridhar Iyengar

Mobile devices and high-speed Internet are driving some businesses and consumers crazy. Today, we can access required information, accomplish business tasks or get things done without moving anywhere. Thanks to the underlying IT infrastructure which comprises hundreds and thousands of network devices, servers and applications for making this possible. However, it is easier said than done.

In reality, providing business-critical services at agreed service levels is not easy because numerous factors such as faulty configuration changes, bandwidth, network performance and attacks affect them. To ensure seamless availability of business-critical services, IT teams have to overcome such challenges. Mostly, these kinds of challenges vary from one company to another based on business needs.

In January 2017, ManageEngine surveyed 150 IT managers, network administrators, CIOs and other IT professionals to find out the top five challenges that might impact IT in 2017:

1. Handling security threats

2. Managing network changes due to the addition of users/applications

3. Budget cuts

4. Keeping track of unauthorized configuration changes

5. Juggling between multiple tools for network management

If you take a closer look at these challenges, most of them have one thing in common. Security threats, budget cuts, managing configuration changes and juggling between multiple tools are dependent on the management tools that IT teams have in place.

Using one tool for one problem used to be the norm in IT, which is the root cause for all such challenges. This model worked when mobile devices and cloud adoption were minimal. However, now end users are very conscious about the quality of services that they use. Even a small delay or timeout issue can make them furious and consider other possible options. It is a tough task for the IT team to ensure 24x7 delivery of business services at great quality.

Having the right set of management tools can help overcome or eliminate these challenges completely. One integrated IT management solution that offers visibility into network, server and application infrastructures can help IT teams discover issues proactively. It should offer correlation between the performance and fault data that helps admins find the root cause of the issue easily and correct it at an early stage so that end users are not affected. With one tool to manage, admins can spend less time on maintenance efforts, such as data backups and service pack upgrades.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

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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 ...

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Taking Down the Top IT Management Challenges for 2017

Sridhar Iyengar

Mobile devices and high-speed Internet are driving some businesses and consumers crazy. Today, we can access required information, accomplish business tasks or get things done without moving anywhere. Thanks to the underlying IT infrastructure which comprises hundreds and thousands of network devices, servers and applications for making this possible. However, it is easier said than done.

In reality, providing business-critical services at agreed service levels is not easy because numerous factors such as faulty configuration changes, bandwidth, network performance and attacks affect them. To ensure seamless availability of business-critical services, IT teams have to overcome such challenges. Mostly, these kinds of challenges vary from one company to another based on business needs.

In January 2017, ManageEngine surveyed 150 IT managers, network administrators, CIOs and other IT professionals to find out the top five challenges that might impact IT in 2017:

1. Handling security threats

2. Managing network changes due to the addition of users/applications

3. Budget cuts

4. Keeping track of unauthorized configuration changes

5. Juggling between multiple tools for network management

If you take a closer look at these challenges, most of them have one thing in common. Security threats, budget cuts, managing configuration changes and juggling between multiple tools are dependent on the management tools that IT teams have in place.

Using one tool for one problem used to be the norm in IT, which is the root cause for all such challenges. This model worked when mobile devices and cloud adoption were minimal. However, now end users are very conscious about the quality of services that they use. Even a small delay or timeout issue can make them furious and consider other possible options. It is a tough task for the IT team to ensure 24x7 delivery of business services at great quality.

Having the right set of management tools can help overcome or eliminate these challenges completely. One integrated IT management solution that offers visibility into network, server and application infrastructures can help IT teams discover issues proactively. It should offer correlation between the performance and fault data that helps admins find the root cause of the issue easily and correct it at an early stage so that end users are not affected. With one tool to manage, admins can spend less time on maintenance efforts, such as data backups and service pack upgrades.

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

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 ...