Increased need for tech pros across hybrid IT environments

The “universal language of IT” encapsulates the evolving role of technology in business, and the tech pros’ responsibility for ensuring overall uptime, availability, and performance as well as greater partnership with leadership to drive business success. As cloud computing continues to grow, tech pros say they are increasingly prioritising areas like hybrid infrastructure management, application performance management (APM), and security management to optimise delivery for the organisations they serve. With the convergence of IT roles in response to the interconnected nature of modern IT environments—and now the need to support a new or larger remote workforce—tech pros are also setting their sights on non-technical and interpersonal skills to ensure teamwork and communication with business leaders increases their fluency in the universal language of IT. Skills development is needed across both technical and non-technical areas to remain successful in today’s environments.

“For years we’ve been talking about hybrid IT and what it means for tech pros; in our seventh year of the IT Trends Report, we see the effects of hybrid IT in breaking down traditional siloes and bringing core competencies across on-premises and cloud environments together,” said Joe Kim, executive vice president and global chief technology officer, SolarWinds. “Especially now, when organisations worldwide are facing new challenges and uncertainty, we must take this reality seriously, focusing on skills development and readiness in key areas like security, cloud infrastructure, and application monitoring. While IT continues to be a main driver of business importance, tech pros have an opportunity to help reassure the business and focus on effectively communicating performance now and into the future.”

“More than ever before, technology professionals must work alongside business leaders to meet organisational goals while also investing time and energy into cultivating the necessary skills to drive business success,” added Kim. “At SolarWinds, we focus on enabling the tech pro with easy to use, affordable products, but we also understand our customers often need more from our partnership. That’s why we also make meaningful investments in providing a wide range of training resources—many of which have been virtual since their inception—and an online user community where they can connect with their peers. We have many ways we do this: our Customer Success Center, MSP Institute, SolarWinds Academy, our THWACK^® community of over 150,000 registered members and yearly virtual learning event, THWACKcamp^™, our bi-annual customer event SolarWinds Empower MSP, and educational digital programming like SolarWinds Lab^™ and TechPod^™. Each of these avenues serves to help make life easier for tech pros so they can drive even more success for the businesses they support.”

2020 Key Findings

SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2020: The Universal Language of IT explores priority areas tech pros manage in a world were roles have converged, and how this reality is affecting skillsets across IT departments and in non-technical areas. Key findings show:

Tech pros are focusing less on emerging technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and edge, and more on hybrid IT and security.

• The top three technologies influencing organisations’ staffing needs (by weighted rank) are:
  • Cloud computing (i.e., SaaS, IaaS, PaaS) (48%)
  • Security and compliance (57%)
  • Hybrid IT (39%)
• Only a collective 16% name emerging technologies—like AI, edge, microservices, and containers—as the biggest influence on staffing needs.
• This makes sense when you consider organisations aren’t allocating their budget to emerging technologies—particularly as this year’s budgets are reevaluated in the face of economic challenges. Nearly three-fourths (71%) indicate their organisations’ tech budgets allocate less than 25% of their spending to emerging technologies.

Today’s hybrid IT reality has created a universal language of IT where tech pro roles and siloes converge, and complexities are exacerbated by flat to shrinking budgets and a lack of qualified personnel.

• With the convergence of technologies and responsibilities, the top three ways tech pro roles have changed over the past three to five years are:
  • Increased work week hours (42%)
  • Increased responsibilities outside the firewall (33%)
  • Need to retrain existing staff (32%)
• At the same time, tech pros are experiencing barriers to successfully supporting their organisations, including:
  • Lack of budget/resources (41%)
  • Unclear or shifting priorities (17%)
  • Currently offered IT management/solutions lack features/functionality to meet my needs (15%)
• What’s more, over one-third (39%) of respondents believe tech pros entering the workforce today don’t have the necessary skills to manage modern, distributed IT environments.

Many personnel and skills issues relate to growing areas like APM and security and compliance.

• Sixty percent of tech pros/teams/IT departments are spending more time managing apps and services rather than infrastructure and hardware. This represents a monumental shift in the strategic importance of applications to the modern business.
  • This growth in the influence of cloud applications on IT and managed services will continue to rise: according to Gartner^®, by 2022, as many as 60% of organisations will use an external service provider’s cloud managed service offering, doubling the 2018 figure. Gartner also predicts the ongoing effect on skills: by 2020, 75% of enterprises will experience visible business disruptions due to infrastructure and operations (I&O) skills gaps, which is an increase from less than 20% in 2016.
• When organisations adopt cloud and/or SaaS technologies, 57% use network traffic analysis/network app analysis, 57% use user experience monitoring, and 44% use log analysis as their top three approaches. 
• When it comes to APM tools, 42% use a mix of native tools (provided by the cloud service provider) and third-party tools. Nineteen percent use only native tools and 13% use only third-party tools.
  • More complexity equals more APM: enterprise businesses are more likely to use log analytics tracing and network traffic analysis/network app analysis.
• For 66% of tech pros, at least 10% of their daily responsibilities include IT security management. At the same time, the top three areas of security skills management tech pro organisations are prioritising for development include (by weighted rank):
  • Network security (43%)
  • Security information and event management (SIEM) (30%)
  • Backup and recovery (28%)

• Similar to the way the universal language of IT has affected IT departments, compliance policies have resulted in 35% of tech pros adding additional IT staff.
• Compliance policies with the greatest effect on IT departments include:

• GDPR (92%)
• PCI DSS (32%)
• SOX (14%)

Tech pros need to develop nontechnical skills to operate within the universal language of IT reality where cross-functional and business-level communication is necessary.

• The nontechnical skills tech pros feel are most critical to successfully manage today’s modern IT environments include:
  • Project management (61%)
  • Interpersonal communication (57%)
  • People management (54%)
    • These results are echoed by CIO’s annual State of the CIO Survey, which revealed the top skills needed for digital transformation were strategy building (40%), project management (32%), and business relationship management (25%). These critical interpersonal skills become more important as tech pros increasingly communicate and collaborate across previously siloed IT functions.
    • According to the LinkedIn^® 2020 Emerging Jobs Report, the demand for soft skills like communication, collaboration, and creativity will continue to rise across the SaaS industry.
• Despite the budget and skills issues tech pros report, 89% of surveyed tech pros say they’re comfortable communicating with business leadership when requesting technology purchases, investing time/budget into team trainings, and the like.