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Two-thirds of IT professionals believe increasingly complex technology is making it more difficult for them to do their jobs successfully, according to a global Ipswitch survey.
The goal of the research, in which more than 1,300 respondents were surveyed, was to gain insight into the current IT management challenges facing today’s IT teams, specifically regarding what they need to monitor, how they accomplish it and where they believe improvements could be made.
“What we found most surprising was that 88 percent of respondents reported that they want IT management software that offers more flexibility with fewer licensing restrictions,” Jeff Loeb, chief marketing officer for Ipswitch, told eWEEK. “It is surprising because with such a high level of dissatisfaction, we think that vendors would have offered alternative solutions earlier. Also, while vendors have focused on single-pane-of-glass solutions that allow you to visualize complex problems, the underlying software license model has not evolved.”
The IT management challenges teams report being most worried about include mobile devices and wireless networks (55 percent), cloud applications (50 percent), virtualization (49 percent), bring your own device (BYOD) (43 percent) and high-bandwidth applications (41 percent), such as video or streaming.
“Business needs are constantly changing, so monitoring needs to be flexible to adapt to these changing business priorities,” Loeb said. “IT teams often have one-off challenges, like troubleshooting a unique problem, so having the flexibility to adapt to these one-offs without having to buy new tools is crucial.”
He noted monitoring flexibility is important so businesses can see where software licenses can be fully utilized without becoming shelfware and unused capacity can be split across technology silos, avoiding waste.
IT teams reported they were not monitoring everything that they would like to to ensure control. Top reasons for this include budget (28 percent), lack of staff (18 percent) and the complexity of the IT environment they have to deal with (15 percent).
Finally, 54 percent said IT management software licensing models are too expensive, inflexible and complicated to deal with.
Overall, the research found IT teams are concerned about losing control of their company’s IT environment as new technologies, devices and requirements are added on a regular basis.
“BYOD devices consume bandwidth on networks, which can tremendously slow down performance of business applications and introduce security vulnerabilities,” Loeb noted. “It’s much harder for IT teams to enforce security policies for devices they do not control.”