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 present challenges when viewed against a backdrop of evolving priorities driven by local market regulation and maturity, and an IT team that must ensure business continuity without straining available resources.
IDC says as more and more mission-critical workloads move to connected cloud architectures that span public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, enterprises need to invest in the tools that will help them ensure consistent policies and performance across all platforms and end users.
Achieving these will be no easy undertaking as heads of IT face recurring issues including budget, time constraints, and barriers to implementing observability as a strategy to keep pace with hybrid IT realities.
In The SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2022—Getting IT Right: Managing Hybrid IT Complexity, IT professionals seem unprepared or underprepared to address the IT complexity in today’s hybrid multi-cloud environment.
The report revealed that the continued expansion of hybrid IT is driving increased levels of IT management complexity, and IT professionals expressed concerns over a lack of confidence in how to best manage it.
Among IT professionals that participated in the study, they pointed to new tools and technologies (42%), increased technology requirements from multiple departments (39%), fragmentation between legacy technologies and new technologies (36%), and a lack of proper tools to manage complexity (32%), as among the key drivers leading to this complexity.
Asked whether the IT complexity that exists today is a result of “our own making and that we can only point the finger at ourselves as far as technology is concerned”, Sudhakar Ramakrishna, president and CEO of SolarWinds, responded by saying: “I think there is some truth to it but I would also say that our digital needs and demands have continuously grown, and in turn, the stress on IT teams has also continued to grow.
He went on to explain that whereas previously, there may have been a single data centre, now there are distributed data centres.
“In addition, there is also the cloud, the explosion of applications, and the individual preferences of users. All these considerations have resulted in significant strain and complexity for IT teams.”
Sudhakar Ramakrishna
He also acknowledged that IT budgets are not growing commensurate to the complexity and the needs that are being put on them.
“Consequently, despite their best intentions, it is difficult for them to satisfy all these disparate and conflicting needs. Thus, it is not just an IT team issue but an industry and ecosystem issue,” he continued.
Barriers leadership will face in simplifying the management of IT
According to Ramakrishna, the first barrier to the simplification of IT is a lack of consistent policies that are required across various environments – on-premises, private cloud, public cloud and hybrid infrastructure.
Without these consistencies, it not only builds on the complexity that organisations have but also builds a security infrastructure that is very difficult to protect against.
“I would focus on developing a consistent policy across all these islands of communication and deployment as these are the most important things to build and prewire,” he added.
Asked if the quest to create consistent policies, will create disruption, Ramakrishna opined that efforts do not necessarily require doing away with what exists. He believed it was more of an evolution.
“Most of the concepts that we are implementing in the name of innovation have existed for a long time. It's just that they must catch up with the exploding complexity and the reduction in budgets. Thus, the intersection of those two elements is where innovation comes into play,” he continued.
Getting buy-in
According to Hagberg Consulting, a common understanding is that executives are hired to make decisions.
“But they are also hired to ensure that the decisions are implemented. Coming to a decision – choosing a direction, formulating a strategy, or deciding on an action plan – is difficult enough in these complex times. Getting people to buy in – to understand, accept, and align behind the plan - is another matter.”
Hagberg Consulting
So how does a CIO get leadership buy-in? Ramakrishna opined that CIOs must assert their position in enterprises to show the CEO and CFO how their work is going to help improve the entire business' future and the entire business' prospects.
“Once that is done and the value addition is demonstrated, then it's a matter of road mapping. They need to show progress, show sequencing and strive to continue to make progress along those deliverables. One is an execution element. One is a strategic element,” he elaborated.
Managing expectations
With revenues and margins remaining under pressure, CFOs are putting greater scrutiny on investments and the leaders asking for these, and in some cases demanding justification for these.
How then does the CIO then manage the expectations of both the leadership operations centre and everything else while at the same time delivering on the promise expectations?
Ramakrishna said CFOs are pulling out the return on investment (ROI) card despite being told that implementing IT can take months or years.
This adds fire to the CFO’s scepticism over such investments. “Thus, we need to look at quick wins, or as we at SolarWinds call it, ‘time-to-value’, that demonstrate business value quickly,” he suggested.
“This should be a metric that CIOs should keep on their radar and demand from vendors such as SolarWinds. The CIO should prioritise vendors, such as SolarWinds, who can demonstrate the best ‘time-to-value’ on the investments,” he went on.
Click on the PodChats player to hear Ramakrishna share his perspective on how the CIO can reign the grow
- What does the report, Getting IT Right: Managing Hybrid IT Complexity, tell us about the state of technology that we are in today?
- IT complexity – is it fair to say that the position we are in today, this complex web of infrastructure, process, people and regulation, is of our own making and we can only point the finger at ourselves?
- If yes, how should enterprises approach the management of such complex environments?
- What are the barriers to simplifying the management of IT post-pandemic?
- What remains the biggest challenge for the CIO in terms of reigning in this complexity?
- How does he or she get leadership buy-in?
- How does he or she get everyone else to adapt to what may well be a new way of managing IT?
- Finally, we are coming to 2023, what do you anticipate will be issues that the CIO needs to work with the CTO (and other members of the leadership) to ensure that technology supports the business despite the uncertainties?
