I had a chance to review some of the findings of a recent survey of more than 300 IT professionals across North America. The survey was conducted by SolarWinds and asked the participants what they saw in terms of changes to infrastructure and changes to the IT landscape in the next few years. Here are a few things that stood out to me:
- Nearly ¼ of all IT pros surveyed indicate that BYOx is the emerging technology that is most disruptive to business (in terms of having the most significant impact on operations as well as IT time/energy spent). Mobility, cloud computing, compliance and compute virtualization (server or desktop) round out the top 5 overall.
- Nearly ¼ of all IT pros surveyed indicate that cloud computing is the most important technology for their business to invest in today in order to remain competitive for the next 3-5 years. Another ⅕ indicate mobility is that of technology.
- Due to infrastructure complexity, over half (54%) of all IT departments surveyed are currently managing: compute virtualization, mobility, compliance, data analytics, SDN/virtual networks, BYOx, cloud computing and self-service automation.
- Just over 40% indicate that both server management and virtualization are the top IT skill-sets that will become automated within the next 3-5 years. This is followed by cloud/SaaS, which will further increase infrastructure complexity-and the demand for these will drive up information security concerns.
It's clear from just these few conclusions that a CIO's plate is full... and will become even fuller as these issues continue to rise to the top of the priority stack. The item that stands out to me the most is that 54% of the IT departments are dealing with a highly complex mix of technologies - and that many of these are relatively new. That means there is little legacy experience to draw on. CIOs need to ramp up the capabilities of their staff in order to get ahead of the changes they are facing. A slide-share of the SolarWinds survey can be viewed here.
For more about implementing a structured DevOps environment, read Scott's article, "What to expect when transitioning to DevOps."
Scott Koegler practiced IT as a CIO for 15 years. He also has more than 20 years experience as a technology journalist covering topics ranging from software and services through business strategy. He has written white papers and directed and published video interviews.
Scott publishes ec-bp.com, a supply chain industry newsletter and has written for publications including Network Computing, Forbes, Internet Evolution, and many others. He also manages and edits SuccessfulBusinessNews.com - a newsletter for small businesses, and NPTechNews.com - a newsletter addressing technology topics geared to nonprofit
