State of IT Management Survey Report 2020-21

As we continue to adapt following the pandemic, which has impact us all both personally and professionally, we take this moment to commemorate the IT veterans we've lost to the pandemic.

With the pandemic drastically changing the way we do business, we have conducted a study to understand the state of IT management at the height of these radical changes and analyzed how to offer a holistic approach to changing IT management needs to prepare for the post-pandemic IT world.

We would like to dedicate this report to all the IT teams who kept their IT up and running during these challenging times. Kudos to your efforts and resilience.

The survey was broadly categorized into six major sections—IT management, cloud, incident management, IT security, endpoint management, and IT operations management—with a focus on developing plausible business suggestions and IT solutions to some of the top industry problems.

At Site24x7, we surveyed 613 IT professionals across a range of topics, organization sizes, and geographies. We broadly categorized the respondents into five major regions: USA and Canada, APAC, Europe, LATAM, and MEA. We have labeled the survey respondents who did not disclose their country of residence as "Unknown." 

Here are the key findings from the survey: 

• SaaS and hybrid delivery models are preferred for IT management tools  . Organizations are betting on AL, ML, IoT, and robotic process automation to improve their business efficiency. Adopting new technologies may end up taxing the existing IT management systems for organizations in various industries. This is why IT teams should consider optimizing their tools for business efficiency.
• The shift from on-premises to the cloud not only requires new strategies and tools, but also expertise. Considering that organizations want to deliver an agile, resilient infrastructure, a hybrid cloud strategy could gain even more prominence in the coming years. Scalability and ease of management remain top cloud migration priorities. 
• Increased efficiency and productivity top the list of benefits of service orchestration   while organizations try to reduce their MTTR. Organizations should invest in AI-driven tools that will help in quick issue detection, root cause analysis, and remediation in order to bring down incident response times.
• Internal process issues and DDoS attacks top the reasons for security breaches  . Insufficient logging and monitoring top the list of OWASP web application security risks  .
• With business needs changing fast, IT teams are looking to expedite their deployment cycles. Technologies like containers and public cloud platforms help in enhancing productivity and reducing costs. Sprawling technologies and ever-increasing tools emphasize the importance of observability. This calls for an AI-driven solution that will be able to provide contextual insights on big data in production. 
• With teams suddenly working remotely in the wake of the COVID-19 breakout, organizations are under even more strain to remain productive and secure. To keep up with this sudden proliferation of end-user and cloud endpoints, IT teams are turning to tools that can provide a modern approach to endpoint management.

These trends and observations were derived based on analyzing many organizations with various parameters in diverse IT environments. You can learn from and benchmark your organization's IT performance against these trends and observations to bridge the IT management gaps in your teams.

Detailed results are contained within this report. Access the report for free.