Blessing or curse?

Hybrid and remote working have multiplied the impact of distributed and complex IT environments. Running workloads and applications in both the cloud and on-premises infrastructure can be a challenge that is increasingly challenging or even hindering the operations of many organizations. Organizations must therefore recognize the need to invest in tools that can ensure consistent policies and performance across all platforms and end users. At the same time, tight budgets, lack of time, or difficulties with observability implementations are preventing many organizations from keeping pace with the hybrid IT reality.

This year's "SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2022 - Getting IT Right: Managing Hybrid IT Complexity" examines the rise of digital transformation and its impact on IT departments. Among other findings, the report found that tech professionals are less confident in their organization's IT management capabilities. Even though more than one-third (38 percent) of tech professionals surveyed said they use monitoring strategies to manage this complexity, 58 percent cited a lack of visibility into the majority of their organization's applications and infrastructure. 

New complexity

They lack this visibility into anomaly detection, root cause analysis and other key processes that ensure the availability, performance and security of mission-critical applications. Nearly one-third (30 percent) of tech professionals surveyed also confirmed that the rise of hybrid IT has added complexity to their organization's IT management. These tech experts cited the following main reasons for increased complexity: new tools and/or technologies; outdated staff knowledge/skills that do not match new technologies; increased technology requirements from multiple departments; and lack of appropriate tools to manage complexity.

When asked how confident they are that their organization can handle complexity well, nearly a quarter (23 percent) responded very confident, and 41 percent responded confident. Less than a third (30 percent) said they were not fully equipped to handle complexity and were only somewhat confident. Another 3 percent were not at all confident. When comparing by company size, it appears that small companies are more confident: Nearly one-third of small companies responded with very confident, compared to 15 percent in large companies.