By Sascha Giese, Head Geek™, SolarWinds
For many people, the pandemic—and the global response to this once-in-a-lifetime event—was a game-changer. The enforced and rapid move to the cloud meant carefully prepared plans for phased IT migration were thrown out the window.
Instead, the explosion of hybrid office environments left public sector IT workers forced to cope with a remote workforce as people abandoned the office to work from home instead.
But as we now know, though this response to the pandemic was pivotal in helping government departments continue to provide essential public services, it did so at a cost.
A study published in June 2022, the SolarWinds® IT Trends Report 2022—Getting IT Right: Managing Hybrid IT Complexity, found the rapid uptake of hybrid IT during this period “increased network complexity for most organisations and caused several worrisome challenges for public sector IT professionals.”
What it discovered is running workloads and applications across both cloud and on-premises infrastructure—and the speed at which these changes were introduced—has proven to be a major challenge.
Facing Up to a New Post-COVID IT Reality
According to the IT professionals surveyed as part of the report, the job of IT teams has become much harder thanks to the new realities of hybrid IT. When pressed, tech pros said they’re unsure about how best to manage this new reality.
Almost one in five (17%) said the acceleration of hybrid IT has increased the complexity of their public sector organisations’ IT management.
When asked to explain why, 50% blamed the increased complexity on the adoption of new tools and/or technologies. And while 40% reported increased technology requirements added to the problem, a similar proportion (31%) blamed “outdated staff skill sets.”
When asked about how confident they were with their organisations’ ability to manage IT complexity, only 12% said they felt “extremely confident.” Half of the respondents (50%) admitted they weren’t “fully equipped to manage complexity” and felt “only somewhat confident” to do so. Only a third of tech pro respondents (33%) said they were confident their organisations are equipped to manage IT complexity adequately.
The Issue of IT Complexity Is Becoming Ever More Complex
When speaking to IT professionals working on the front line of public sector IT projects, the issue of complexity comes up time and time again. It’s as if IT teams are in a downward spiral, with issues of complexity made worse because of limited visibility into networks, apps, and infrastructure.
And as this visibility becomes harder to focus on, it becomes increasingly more challenging to conduct tasks such as anomaly detection, easy root cause analysis, and other critical processes to ensure the availability, performance, and security of business-critical applications.
Though it may be easy for some to dismiss such concerns as being a “post-COVID hangover” or “teething troubles” associated with the new hybrid way of working, the findings from the survey paint a different picture.
Nine in 10 (88%) of those questioned agreed return on investment (ROI) was impacted during an IT project they oversaw in the past 12 – 18 months. A third (36%) said the IT projects took four to seven or more months more to complete than scheduled, and 52% said these projects were extended by up to three months. The reason? Hybrid IT complexity.
The Impact of Hybrid Working Has to Be Taken Seriously
No one can doubt the way public sector IT professionals responded to the pandemic helped governments keep functioning.
But public sector organisations need to take stock of what happened over the last couple of years and speak to those on the front line of this extraordinary IT event if they are to gain valuable insights.
If they do, they’ll discover IT pros want more time and resources to help implement observability strategies and manage hybrid IT realities more effectively. By listening to IT pros, decision makers can gain a better understanding of the impact hybrid working has had on increasing operational complexity.
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