These past couple of years have seen the pace of digital transformation increase dramatically as organizations globally moved to the cloud and embraced hybrid office environments to overcome the limitations imposed by COVID-19.

But despite enabling operational continuity, gains in efficiencies and business opportunities, the accelerated adoption of new technologies and digital platforms has also driven a rise of IT complexity, introducing new challenges and pain points to IT teams, according to a new report by business software provider SolarWinds.

SolarWinds’ 2022 IT Trends Report, released on June 20, 2022, shares results of a global survey conducted in March that sought to unveil tech professionals’ confidence in managing modern IT environments, the resources their organizations plan to invest in, and IT teams’ ability to promptly deliver meaningful projects for the business and its employees.

Results from this year’s study reveal that IT professionals are lacking confidence in their ability to manage today’s hybrid IT environments, which have become profoundly complex and dispersed across different systems.

Increased complexity hinders visibility

Of the 100+ technology practitioners, managers, directors, and senior executives polled in the Middle East, 20% said that the acceleration of hybrid IT, where an organization uses both in-house and cloud-based services to complete its pool of IT resources, has increased the complexity of their organization’s IT management, a predicament that has been exacerbated by inefficient change management processes (60%), outdated staff skillsets (40%), increased technology requirements from multiple departments (40%), and new tools and/or technologies (35%).

Increased IT complexity is causing serious gaps in end-to-end visibility, with more than half (58%) of respondents in the Middle East stating that they only have visibility into about half or less of their apps and infrastructure.

That issue is hampering organizations’ ability to conduct anomaly detection, easy root-cause analysis, and other critical processes to ensure not only the availability and performance of business-critical applications, but also their security.

Security risks

Complex infrastructure makes it challenging for organizations to roll out security tools and track down the signs of an attack in a timely manner, and are now posing serious security risks for businesses worldwide.

A 2021 study by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky found complex IT environments to be the second most prominent security concerns for organizations, with the lack of visibility over the infrastructure cited as the most common challenge (41%) organizations faced when dealing with complex threats.

This comes on the back of rising cybersecurity threats amid increased consumer and business online activities.

In H1 2021, the number of ransomware attacks surged by a staggering 151% worldwide, data from the World Economic Forum show.

The organization estimates that breaches cost businesses a whopping US$3.6 million per incident on average. But more worriedly, businesses need an average of 280 days to identify and respond to a cyberattack.

Budget and time constraints

IT complexity has become a critical issue that organizations must address. Nearly half (42%) of tech professionals in the Middle East believe the best way to tackle this problem is by adopting IT management tools and embracing observability, a strategy focusing on leveraging proactive insights, analytics, and actionable intelligence from collected data to understand the internal state or condition of a complex system.

Among the biggest areas of impact respondents expect to see if their organizations implemented IT management tools, 33% cited increased apps’ performance, 31% converged roles and responsibility which drive budget savings, and 29% increased productivity.

But despite these potential gains and benefits, tech professionals indicated facing a number of challenges in implementing observability as a strategy and adopting IT management tools, the biggest barrier being their organization’s outdated tech environments (42%), followed by time constraints (33%), the lack of resources (33%) and the lack of budget (30%).

Featured image credit: Freepik