OpsRamp Survey Shows IT Spending Remains Strong, With Focus on Minimizing Business Risk during COVID-19

Seventy-three percent of IT operations and DevOps leaders expect to either accelerate or maintain digital transformation initiatives through the global pandemic

OpsRamp, a modern SaaS platform for hybrid infrastructure discovery, monitoring, management, and automation, today announced the launch of a new report: “Thriving in the New Normal: How IT Operations Leaders Can Deliver Business Value in an Economic Slowdown.”

Enterprise IT organizations are facing extraordinary challenges as they shift to supporting remote workforces and meeting the needs of online customers and partners. The survey, conducted on April 1st, 2020 is based on responses from 137 IT operations leaders at U.S. companies with at least 500 employees and $5 million in annual IT budgets. Participants were asked how enterprises will align technology priorities, budgets, and hiring in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here are the top three insights from the report:

Keep Investing in IT: The majority of IT leaders (58%) expect to either significantly or moderately increase their annual technology budgets right now while 38% plan to either significantly or moderately reduce their technology spending. Meanwhile, 73% of IT operations and DevOps team leaders expect to either accelerate or maintain digital transformation initiatives and projects, indicating the value of digital products and services in an era of social distancing.

Prioritize for Business Value: IT leaders understand the need to run business operations smoothly during massive remote work scenarios. To that end, they are prioritizing on technologies to keep business services secure, optimized and always available, including:

• Technology investments. IT leaders are investing heavily in information security and compliance (62%) to help protect remote workers from sophisticated cyber attacks, big data and analytics (46%) that deliver rapid customer insights and feedback for fact-based decision making, and public and multi-cloud infrastructure (45%) that can help their teams quickly tap into on-demand computing power from hyperscale providers.
• Performance monitoring is a top priority. To proactively identify performance issues and boost customer experience, technology leaders are investing in AIOps (69%) tools that can detect, diagnose, and resolve incidents at scale, cloud native observability (51%) tools that maintain visibility into the health of distributed microservices applications, and network performance monitoring and diagnostics (51%) tools that help IT teams cope with traffic spikes and high levels of network utilization.

Get Creative on Costs: IT leaders must deliver superb user experiences to keep customers happy and loyal but under tighter cost constraints. IT leaders will need to bring down the cost of 'keeping the lights on' so they can reallocate a greater portion of their budgets towards strategic initiatives that deliver immediate business value. IT operations and DevOps teams are thinking through the following cost-cutting measures:

• Cost reduction initiatives. IT teams are investing in self-service technologies (60%) so that they free their staff from reactive work, driving technology vendor consolidation (59%) so that they can eliminate waste and work with strategic technology suppliers and partnering with managed service providers (58%) to reduce the cost of internal operations and gain access to skilled technologists.
• Hiring priorities. IT leaders are planning to hire more IT financial analysts (68%) than cloud architects (53%), DevOps engineers (50%) and data scientists (47%). Technology chiefs will need to work with their finance counterparts to align IT spending with organizational priorities and ensure they have the right benchmarks in place to measure the business impact of IT investments. Without financial accountability, IT leaders will struggle to meet their funding goals or gain the C-level support needed for digital business transformation.

“Enterprises and their IT organizations are dealing with unpredictable change every day, and how they make decisions now and for the future will play a critical role in their recovery after this pandemic has slowed down,” said Varma Kunaparaju, CEO of OpsRamp. “IT operations and DevOps teams should work with technology vendors and service providers that can help them quickly navigate this landscape with secure, high-performing and cost-efficient capabilities across business applications and infrastructure to weather this economic storm.”

Source: OpsRamp media announcement