DEVOPSdigest

Adoption of cloud technologies and DevOps methodologies continues to grow as established companies seek to transform their businesses in order to better serve modern customers, according to a survey conducted by NetEnrich to understand how business-user demands are impacting corporate IT departments.

Nearly 97% of respondents said they are moving applications and workloads into a public, private or hybrid cloud environment, and 68% said that DevOps has been integrated well into their traditional IT and tech operations teams.

And yet, despite these advances, enterprise IT departments remain challenged to keep pace with the demands of business users for new products and services. The reason: IT is spending too much time on day to day systems maintenance, and internal teams lack the skills necessary to deploy, manage, and optimize cloud and DevOps environments.

According to the NetEnrich survey:

■ 42% of IT executives said their internal teams don't have the expertise and/or resources to migrate applications to the cloud.

■ 39% said they don't have the ability to optimize cloud deployments for cost and performance.

■ 34% said they'd be unable to manage cloud technologies on an ongoing basis.

■ 33% of IT executives said their most skilled staff is working "just to keep the lights on."

In some cases, the lack of available, skilled talent is causing companies to put business plans on hold, jeopardizing their ability to evolve, compete and grow.

In other cases, business users are taking matters into their own hands, pursuing Shadow IT initiatives about which IT is neither aware or involved. Sixty-two percent of survey respondents said that up to 20% of their company's tech funding was being spent on Shadow IT, while 23% reported that Shadow IT was consuming as much as 40% of tech budgets.

IT executives responding to the survey were unanimous in their opinion that Shadow IT is a risk to their companies and sometimes themselves, with security (38%) and application performance (22%) cited as the most common concerns. In addition, 18% confessed that their biggest Shadow IT concern was its ability to decrease IT's relevance to the organization. Another 11% said it would result in smaller IT budgets.

The NetEnrich survey revealed several other interesting IT trends:

■ 13% of IT execs have not yet considered the use of cloud management tools.

■ 15% cited a lack of in-house talent to address agile IT initiatives in particular.

■ 22% said business demands are too fast and too big, causing IT to say "No."

■ 41% said their biggest cost concern is that funds were being wasted on technology that isn't getting used or is not delivering the intended results.

■ 58% of IT departments do not yet have a DevOps team.

"Corporate IT departments are in a real bind," says Raju Chekuri, CEO at NetEnrich. "On the one hand, demand for the services they provide has never been greater. On the other hand, they're spread thin due to a lack of skilled, available resources, and old world capabilities. The result is poor oversight of existing projects, fewer new projects, and more Shadow IT. What's needed are tools that automate infrastructure management, while freeing up internal teams to be proactive in their support of business users."

Survey Methodology: NetEnrich surveyed 200 IT executives in large and mid-market companies in the United States. The survey, was conducted online in July 2015 and included companies between $400M and $10B in revenue.

Chris Joseph is VP Product Management and Marketing at NetEnrich.