Author: Matthias Gromann
Companies are increasingly under pressure to keep up with the fast pace of digitization. Holistic, modern IT infrastructure management ensures that they remain competitive and capable of running their business. But how well are companies really prepared for this and what demands do they place on IT infrastructure management? We have investigated this together with techconsult in a study. The result: many of the IT managers surveyed are dissatisfied with IT infrastructure management in their respective companies.
Importance, maturity and budget
IT infrastructure management has the important task of ensuring a stable, high-performance IT environment that can respond quickly and flexibly to innovations and changes. According to the survey, however, only one in two companies currently rates the importance of infrastructure management as “very high” or “high”. Our study comes to a similar conclusion when it comes to the question of maturity. Only 46% of companies consider their IT infrastructure management to be at a “very good” or “good” state of the art. 54 percent of companies operate at a “medium”, “low” or “very low” level of maturity.
Due to the poor level of maturity and low relevance, the budget allocation in the companies is also rather poor. Although IT infrastructure management bears the main burden of IT operations and is responsible for the majority of technological innovations, 43% of companies do not allocate sufficient – 9% even no – monetary resources for optimization.
Yet the need is great: one-third of companies spend too much time managing and maintaining the infrastructure, and 31% state that the IT infrastructure they use is not fully optimized for their own applications. Overall, 30 %of companies lack the staff and skills to operate the infrastructure as efficiently as possible. There is also a lack of protection against cyber-attacks at more than one in four companies.
Coexistence of cloud and on-premises
Our study further concludes that companies cannot dispense with either on-premises or cloud. The coexistence of both infrastructure worlds seems to be the solution. But what exactly is the distribution of the share?
- 60 %of companies rely on a hybrid approach. The respective share depends on the specific requirements.
- 35% keep most of the on-premises infrastructure and migrate only certain workloads to the cloud.
- 25% replace the larger part with the cloud and only the most important core functionalities remain on-premises.
- A full 12% are in favor of a cloud-only strategy.
- 28% remain with on-premises infrastructure as the sole and central mode of operation.
The results clearly show that companies want to use modern cloud applications without having to dispense with traditional IT infrastructures. The reason being is that the latter continue to have major advantages. Since 59%of companies place high IT security requirements on their own IT infrastructure, they still consider a local structure to be particularly important for their core business. Another aspect is the desire for corporate control. 51% of companies are reluctant to hand over control of their critical infrastructure to third parties. Data protection also plays a special role for just over half of the companies. To get the best of both worlds, a hybrid strategy makes sense.
Demands on infrastructure solutions
IT managers want solutions that bundle several isolated aspects into one holistic tool. The tool should:
- increase the efficiency of IT processes and help use resources more efficiently (53 %).
- optimize processes for IT infrastructure provisioning and lifecycle management of infrastructure elements (41 %).
- increase the speed of response to service-relevant changes to the IT infrastructure (43 %).
- simplify integration with other systems (41 %).
- visualize the entire IT structure (40 %).
- avoid vendor lock-in through vendor-neutral tools (30 %).
Conclusion
Modern IT management must be able to understand and manage cloud and on-premises IT architectures in equal measure. It should reduce the increasing complexity of the cloud landscape and unite it with the on-premises infrastructure in a hybrid IT landscape. The IT departments are ready for this. Now all that remains is to convince the management levels. Because as our brief study shows, in many cases they do not yet recognize the full potential of digitizing IT infrastructure management.
In our white paper “Managing Hybrid IT Infrastructures” you will find even more study results and exciting insights into IT infrastructure management.
About the study
For the study “IT Infrastructure Management”, techconsult and surveyed 203 companies with more than 1,000 employees across all sectors. In addition to their suitability as IT experts, IT management decision-making powers were also used to qualify respondents.
