IT Infrastructure Changes Present Challenge
The annual IT Automation Insights Survey have revealed a lot of interesting findings, with the top challenge being changes in IT Infrastructure.
This past January, Advanced Systems Concepts conducted its annual Insights Survey to identify and understand new and emerging trends in the field of Workload Automation. More than 400 IT professionals from the Americas, EMEA, and APAC responded, with 28% indicating they were in a C-level, directorial, or managerial role, 26% identifying as engineers, programmers, and developers, 17% as analysts, 11% as administrators, and 10% as architects, and 8% as “other”.
Changes in IT Infrastructure was identified as the #1 IT Challenge of 2016
While most organizations still remain slightly cautious with the idea of replacing on-premise systems with public cloud and virtual resources, they are recognizing and taking advantage of the benefits it brings – scalability, flexibility, cost effectiveness, and more. Our findings show that organizations have identified a need for an IT automation solution that can help them fully realize and achieve the benefits of cloud computing.
One such way automation can do this is by offering just-in-time resource provisioning, which allows organizations to spin up or spin down cloud and virtual resources automatically, depending on resource requirements, historical data, forecasted workloads, and SLA expectations. As a result, organizations can optimize their cloud spending while reducing the need for manual intervention to manage these systems.
IT budget constraints, coupled with an IT talent shortage, are driving organizations to automate more and more.
In a short period of time, computing resources have gone from expensive and scarce to highly available and affordable, meaning there are more applications and servers per IT professional than ever before. In addition, IT talent acquisition has not been able to keep up with this growth, and finding experienced IT experts with the right skill sets has become a serious issue. Compounding the problem even further, IT budgets aren’t increasing. Our findings show that organizations are struggling with these problems and beginning to realize that the only way to solve them is through automating the management of their IT environment as much as possible. In fact, 78% of respondents reported an increase in their use of automation in the last 12 months.
Constantly changing regulatory, IT auditing, and compliance requirements continue to be major impediments to doing business.
Whether in the retail, healthcare, or financial industry, compliance requirements and reporting regulations are constantly evolving. Adapting to these regulations has become a huge obstacle for most publicly audited and regulated organizations.
Respondents to the 2016 Insights Survey indicated a need for policy-based control in their workload automation solution to ensure regulatory compliance and mitigate risk. IT security has also become more critical than ever before. More than half of the survey respondents indicated they are currently using a Privileged Account/Password Management System, and organizations are beginning to demand integration between these types of systems and their workload automation solutions.
Interest in SaaS or pay-as-you-go workload automation offerings is increasing within the enterprise IT community.
Finding and deploying a new enterprise software solution can be taxing, and this is driving many in the enterprise IT community to take a second look at SaaS and pay-as-you-go workload automation offerings. Such types of offerings are attractive because they provide users with faster access, lower initial costs, accelerated time to benefit, scalability, and flexibility. They also remove the potential difficulties surrounding upgrades and give users the ability to compare options, read reviews, and quickly find the software they need. Over half of organizations surveyed reported they would be interested in a cloud-based workload automation subscription.
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