SolarWinds: Hybrid IT Acceleration Has Increased Network Complexity

SolarWinds, an Austin, Texas-based IT management software vendor, has released a new report that says the acceleration of hybrid IT has increased network complexity for most organizations and caused several worrisome challenges for IT professionals.

According to “The SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2022—Getting IT Right: Managing Hybrid IT Complexity,” hybrid and remote work have amplified the impact of distributed and complex IT environments. Running workloads and applications across both cloud and on-premises infrastructure can be challenging, and many organizations are increasingly experiencing—and ultimately hindered by—these pain points.

The new SolarWinds report also found tech professionals feel less confident in their organization’s ability to manage IT. While more than half (54%) of tech pro respondents state they leverage monitoring strategies to manage this complexity, 49% revealed they lack visibility into the majority of their organization’s apps and infrastructure. This lack of visibility impacts their ability to conduct anomaly detection, easy root-cause analysis, and other critical processes to ensure the availability, performance, and security of business-critical applications.

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

The continued expanse of hybrid IT is driving increased levels of IT management complexity, but tech pros feel a lack of confidence in how best to manage it. Nearly half of tech pros respondents (49%) confirmed the acceleration of hybrid IT has increased the complexity of their organization’s IT management, particularly driven by fragmentation between legacy technologies and new technologies (43%), increased technology requirements from multiple departments (42%), and new tools and/or technologies (38%).

More than a third of respondents (36%) admitted they weren’t fully equipped to manage complexity and felt only somewhat confident. Only 8% of tech pro respondents said they felt extremely confident. An additional 4% weren’t confident at all. Large enterprises experienced the lowest level of confidence, with only 47% of respondents saying they’re confident and 36% saying they’re somewhat confident. Visibility is a particular area of concern. With the increased shift to complex, hybrid IT environments, technology professionals say they have limited visibility into their networks, apps, and infrastructure.

Three-quarters (75%) of tech pro respondents state their organization has prioritized adopting a hybrid IT strategy for their technology environment within the next three years.

The findings are based on a survey fielded in March 2022, which yielded responses from 237 technology practitioners, managers, directors, and senior executives in the U.S. and Canada from public- and private-sector small, mid-size, and enterprise organizations. Regions included North America, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom, with 1,138 respondents across all geographies combined.

Channel Impact^®
The continued shift to hybrid IT drives increased levels of IT management complexity, and tech pros feel a lack of confidence in how to best manage it. This is clearly an environment in which channel partners can step up to add value.