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Organizations large and small are struggling to meet their key performance indicator (KPI) goals and prevent IT issues before they adversely impact the business, according to a Continuity Software survey of 200 IT professionals from various industries.
The survey found that organizations detect and address an average of only 57 percent of critical IT issues before they impact the business.
“The most surprising finding in my mind is that only 29 percent of the respondents consistently met or exceeded their KPI goals,” Eran Livneh, vice president of marketing for Continuity Software, told eWEEK. “With the amount of time and money invested in IT infrastructure and IT operations, one could expect better results, as meeting availability goals most of the time is simply not good enough for critical IT operations.”
Uptime is the leading KPI for IT operations, used by 89 percent of respondents. Just over half (51 percent) of respondents track uptime in real-time, while 19 percent track it daily.
Organizations are least likely to monitor KPIs in the cloud environment. Only 20 percent do so. More than 70 percent of organizations monitor KPIs across their networks, databases, applications and storage.
“As the survey shows, ensuring consistent performance and uptime are the two greatest challenges facing IT operations. We can also see the challenges and opportunities presented by the cloud,” Livneh said. “While more and more critical applications are moving to the private cloud, organizations still lag in their ability to adequately measure and monitor the cloud environment for configuration consistency. Last but not least, IT organizations are in dire need of better tools for measurement & analysis, enforcement of IT best practices, and detection of cross-domain IT configuration issues.”
Just over three-quarters (76 percent) of respondents who use IT operations analytics said they find these solutions helpful or extremely helpful in early detection of IT issues.
Respondents said they believe the best way to improve operations excellence is to use better tools for measurement and analysis (28 percent), use tools to enforce IT best practices (28 percent), or use tools to detect cross-domain IT configuration issues (22 percent).
“IT operations analytics are evolving in a number of important directions. Probably the most important development is the transformation from descriptive analytics, looking at past events, to predictive analytics, which provides IT organizations with actionable insights and the ability to proactively prevent future disruptions,” Livneh said. “This is especially important since the IT landscape is changing so rapidly that fixing past mistakes is hardly ever a guarantee for prevention of future failures.”