Tensions are now so great that nearly 80% of the 1,000 IT professionals polled by OpTier admitted to feeling anxiety about the performance of business applications, and a third have been kept awake at night worrying about it. A lack of control is viewed as a major concern by many; with 90% of those surveyed saying gaining control of IT performance is extremely important to them.
The most common factors contributing to escalating stress levels were increasingly complex IT environments (23%) and out-dated performance management solutions (26%) that generate too much useless information (27%). Together, all of these factors create blind spots that make IT problems hard to locate and solve – like a game of hide and seek.
The stress endured as a result of playing hide and seek with IT performance problems has left one in four wanting to pull their hair out, 34% screaming in frustration and 29% ranting at a colleague. IT professionals are a hardy bunch though, with only 14% saying on-going performance woes have left them looking for a new job.
Brian James, SVP Marketing, OpTier said: “For many companies when an IT problem hits, it’s like trying to solve an advanced Sudoku puzzle. We’ve all ranted at our computer when it’s not working and we don’t know why – imagine that feeling and multiply it by thousands of IT infrastructure components and systems. Existing tools may provide visibility into each silo – but each silo is only one part of the puzzle. IT operations professionals need a new approach that automatically ties infrastructure to the transactions it supports – so problems can be identified, isolated and solved quickly and stress levels brought down.”
The research found that moving applications and services to the cloud is only adding to IT woes. One third of IT managers said that their biggest concern about moving to the cloud was a worsening control over performance. This may well be because IT problems become even harder to resolve when they involve distributed environments.
Whilst one third are concerned about a loss of control, 26% said that they expected monitoring IT to become more stressful as they don’t have the right tools in place to manage the performance of cloud applications in-line with business expectations. As such, moving to an off-premise approach would see their stress levels move up. All is not lost though as 68% said that better monitoring of transactions and services would ease the pressure.
James continued: “Businesses just want their applications and services to work – regardless of location. Companies need a better approach that provides them with complete visibility into the performance of end-to-end business transactions regardless of whether they are on or off premise or in a cloud. This will help move IT away from making educated guesses and towards a more strategic approach that sits at the heart of any competitive, innovative and successful organisation.”