Hybrid Computing Acceleration Increases Complexity

Software company SolarWinds has found that the growing adoption of hybrid computing is increasing network complexity for most organizations. As the company explains, IT professionals face troubling challenges. Only 8% of technicians said they were extremely confident in their organization’s ability to handle IT complexity.

These findings were published in the company’s ninth annual IT Trends Report. The SolarWinds 2022 IT Trends Report—Getting IT Right: Managing Hybrid IT Complexity examines the acceleration of digital transformation efforts. It also assesses its impact on IT services. The findings of this year’s North American report are based on a survey of 237 technology practitioners, managers, directors and senior executives in the United States and Canada. They came from small, medium and large companies in the public and private sectors.

Workloads and Applications

Sudhakar Ramakrishna is President and CEO of SolarWinds.

“Operational complexity prevents organizations from capitalizing on their technology-driven transformation and investments and delivering benefits to end users,” Ramakrishna said. “As organizations look beyond the pandemic, they need to re-examine their investments of the past few years. Part of this requires organizations to have visibility into their IT environments to understand what is working and what is not, and where to prioritize their efforts to achieve the targeted ROI in their planned projects.

Hybrid and remote working have amplified the impact of distributed and complex IT environments. Running workloads and applications on cloud and on-premises infrastructure can be challenging. Many organizations are increasingly confronted with – and ultimately hampered by – these pain points. More and more mission-critical workloads are migrating to connected cloud architectures that span public, private, hybrid, and multicloud environments. Companies recognize that they need to invest in the tools that will help them ensure consistent policies and performance across all platforms and end users. However, they simultaneously face challenges. These include budget, time constraints, and barriers to implementing observability as a strategy to keep pace with hybrid computing realities.

Monitoring strategies

“Observability is increasingly becoming the clear answer for technology professionals tasked with managing higher levels of complexity in these diverse and distributed environments spanning on-premises, private and public clouds,” Ramakrishna said. “However, organizations must set aside time and resources to develop and train technology professionals to help them properly implement observability strategies and more effectively manage hybrid IT realities – and prepare their teams and their activities for long-term success.”

More than half (54%) of tech professionals surveyed say they are leveraging monitoring strategies to manage this new complexity. However, 49% said they lacked visibility into the majority of their organization’s applications and infrastructure. This lack of visibility impacts their ability to perform anomaly detection, easy root cause analysis, and other critical processes. These guarantee the availability, performance and security of business-critical applications.

Interestingly, 59% of small businesses surveyed cited increased technology requirements across multiple departments as the primary cause of increased complexity. Compare that to 40% of their midsize counterparts and 37% of their enterprise counterparts.

The lack of visibility of organizations on their networks has an impact on the return on investment. Twenty-one percent of respondents said the IT project in question took an additional four to seven months or more. Twenty-eight percent said the project in question had been extended for up to three months. However, three-quarters (75%) of technology professionals surveyed say their organization has prioritized adopting a hybrid IT strategy for their technology environment over the next three years.