An OpsRamp survey of IT managers described the ups and downs of departments trying to modernize under weighty cost constraints.
Software company OpsRamp surveyed 250 IT managers on current trends as well as the future of the industry. They sought to answer three questions: What forces prevent IT operations from embracing modernization, how can companies develop high-performance digital operations teams, and how can they recruit or retain elite talent to accelerate digital transformation.
In the "Adapt or Perish: The OpsRamp Report on Modern IT Operations in the Digital Age" survey, all of the respondents worked for companies with more than 500 employees and were based in the United States.
The survey found that nearly 90% of enterprises have at least one quarter of their Infrastructure running in the cloud. Under 10% used entirely cloud-based Infrastructure systems, but more than half had at least 50% of their systems in the cloud.
"The rapid adoption of public cloud services coupled with cloud native patterns (microservices and containers) for building modern applications will require significant rethinking and overhauling of traditional IT operations practices," the survey said. "Digital operations teams will need to build the right skills, knowledge, and capabilities to thrive in a world where the technology infrastructure will be increasingly hybrid and new workloads will be largely invisible."
More importantly, most respondents said their companies had moved more than half of their mission-critical workloads to the public cloud. Companies were switching to the cloud primarily because it allows organizations to release applications more frequently with scalable infrastructure, has flexible pay-as-you-go pricing models, and enables streamlined collaboration.
The survey highlighted that DevOps practices were now very important skills any modern IT department needed in order to carry out critical actions like agile planning, configuration management, continuous integration, and automated deployments.
The most in-demand IT skills revolve around DevOps, which has become vital to building apps and services with frequent deployments, continuous improvements, and lower failure rates. IT departments also need people skilled in using cloud environments.Â
According to the study, worldwide public cloud spending will double from $229 billion in 2019 to $500 billion in 2023. New jobs like cloud engineers and cloud architects are now massively important for deploying and optimizing highly available applications.
