Today’s Technology Landscape: Not Your Father’s IT

Using SolarWinds’ knowledge base, we examine how new technology has transformed the IT department and the IT professional’s role.

The rapid and continued adoption of new technologies has become the norm in businesses and IT departments, as 93 percent of IT professionals say adopting significant new technologies is at least somewhat important to their organizations’ long-term success.

The introduction of the cloud has especially changed the face of IT and has introduced hybrid IT environments that combine traditional on-premises infrastructure with the cloud. In fact, 92 percent of IT pros say adopting cloud technologies is important to their organizations’ long-term business success, but 60 percent say it’s unlikely all their organizations’ infrastructure will ever be migrated to the cloud.

With the adoption of new technologies like the cloud comes more complex IT infrastructures and new challenges compared to the IT landscape of the past. More than half of all IT departments now manage virtualization, mobility, compliance, data analytics, SDN/virtual networks, BYOx, cloud computing and self-service automation, and 52 percent of IT professionals say increasing complexity over the past three to five years has greatly affected their responsibilities.

These new challenges are requiring IT professionals to add new skill sets to keep pace with the changing IT environment. In fact, more than 50 percent of IT professionals say information security and cloud computing top the list of IT skills that will grow in demand over the next three to five years. In order to best manage hybrid IT environments, IT pros say they need these top five skills: hybrid IT monitoring/management tools and metrics; application migration; distributed architectures; service-oriented architectures; and automation and vendor management.

Budget limitations ranked as the top barrier to adopting significant new technologies, followed by the inability to convince decision makers of the need and/or benefit, and a shortage of IT personnel to implement and/or manage the technology. When it comes to the cloud, the top three barriers to greater adoption by weighted rank are security/compliance concerns; the need to support legacy systems; and, once again, budget limitations.

While IT works to overcome these challenges, today’s end users are also feeling the effects of new technology adoption. Nearly 90 percent said their organizations’ end users were negatively affected by an application performance or availability issue with business-critical technology in the span of a year, and nearly a quarter of those issues occurred six times or more.

Today’s IT professionals are also expected to weigh in on strategic business decisions since technology has become such an important part of business; 99 percent say they are given the opportunity to at least occasionally provide the guidance and expertise needed to help their companies make such decisions.

With the challenges of modern IT environments mounting daily, it’s important to listen to IT professionals’ needs in order to empower them to help businesses succeed. To feel more empowered to provide business-level strategic advice, slightly more than half say they need more training in their area(s) of responsibility, and nearly 40 percent say they need a better understanding of their companies’ overall business. Furthermore, nearly 50 percent say more resources—such as budget, personnel and time—ranked as their No. 1 need to feel more empowered overall.