Report finds budgets still ops greatest struggle

Report finds budgets still ops greatest struggle

AIOps platform provider OpsRamp just released its annual state of IT Ops report, offering insight into the skills needed to succeed in modern IT operations and the obstacles that keep teams from doing so.

The OpsRamp report surveyed 250 US-based people working at IT manager level or above in enterprises with more than 500 employees. Asked about the biggest challenges to “effective IT operations management”, 64 per cent of respondents called out business leaders asking IT teams to do more jobs with fewer resources. 49 per cent named a lack of skill detrimental to their teams success, while 41 per cent struggled with legacy tools taking up time and making innovation harder.

Though it doesn’t offer a cure for lack of investment, the report encourages IT leaders to assess the skills required to move digital transformations forward and help their teams to acquire them, should outside talent be hard to come by. Given the growing volumes of data, machine learning and data science are on the top of OpsRamp’s skill list to “improve day-to-day operational performance” and “proactive and continuous IT optimisation”.

However, when drilling a bit deeper into what is needed to make IT operations successful, knowledge of these technologies pales (44 per cent and 47 per cent respectively) in comparison to the need for teams to embrace a DevOps approach. 64 per cent think knowing about and implementing DevOps practices is a key skill to ensure success, even though the definition seems a bit foggy. This is followed by getting cloud certifications (61 per cent) and actually having domain knowledge (56 per cent). 

If you’re now wondering what success in IT operations might look like, the report also serves a couple of metrics respondents are judged by. It all goes back to the “do more with less” pattern, since 60 per cent name cost as the leading metric, followed by customer satisfaction (52 per cent) and “agility and turnaround time” (46 per cent). To comply with that, the report concludes that teams will have to shift their focus from maintenance to transformative products and services, which some surely would like, but that doesn’t exactly help when money-spinning products depend on legacy components.

Other findings of the report include that “nearly 60 per cent of organisation have more than half of their mission-critical workloads running in the public cloud”, which may explain the felt importance of certifications, and the need for a “fantastic work culture” to retain talent and have more success hiring. If budget allows, that is.