The IT management challenges that IT teams were most worried about included mobile devices and wireless networks, cloud apps and virtualization.
Two thirds of IT professionals feel that increasing IT complexity makes it more difficult for them to do their jobs successfully, according to a global Ipswitch survey of more than 1,300 respondents.The goal of the research was to gain insight into the current IT management challenges facing today’s IT teams, especially when it comes to what they need to monitor, how they accomplish it and where they thought 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 that IT teams were most worried about included 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 tool is crucial." He explained monitoring flexibility is important so businesses can see where software licenses can be fully utilized without shelfware and unused capacity split across technology silos, avoiding waste.IT teams reported that they were not monitoring everything that they would like to in order 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 pointed to IT teams generally feeling that they are concerned about losing control of their company’s IT environment in the face of the new technologies, devices and requirements being 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."
- eWeek