European CIOs and IT managers lack the technical capabilities to administer infrastructure performance management across their data centres.
This is one of the findings from a survey of European IT decision-makers carried out by infrastructure performance management (IPM) vendor Virtual Instruments.
Today an IT infrastructure is more crucial than ever to a successful business. End-users expect access to their applications and data anytime, putting ever-greater pressure on the IT environment to support exponentially increasing and unpredictable workloads.
This trend is creating a highly complex, multi-vendor, multi-layer data centre that is perpetually evolving; as a result gaining a clear and unbiased understanding of the end-to-end infrastructure is nearly impossible.
This survey of CIOs and senior decision-makers based around the world was conducted to provide a snapshot of organisations’ ability to monitor the performance and health of their IT infrastructures.
Today’s IT decision-makers are looking for ways to optimise and consolidate their data centres, reduce costs and improve efficiencies. Many are turning to virtualisation, cloud computing and software-defined technologies to help them get more value out of their existing assets while improving agility.
The Virtual Instruments survey found that 86% of respondents agree that an IPM solution can help improve the IT department’s performance in terms of meeting the needs of the business.
In addition 79% of respondents agree that an IPM solution can improve the agility of the IT department; 70% think that it can reduce the risks of IT failures within their businesses; and 59% agree that it can reduce the costs of running their IT departments. Nonetheless a significant proportion (two out of five) of respondents feel unhappy with the tools they currently have in place to identify performance issues associated with their IT infrastructures.
“As CIOs and IT managers grapple with the growing demands placed on their infrastructures, infrastructure performance management is more of a priority than ever before. Clearly, these decision-makers recognise that IPM tools are business critical, not just to improve their own working environments, but for the overall success of the organisation,” says Chris James, marketing director: EMEA at Virtual Instruments.
There are a number of driving forces contributing to clarity in the monitoring of a data centre today. Additional layers of abstraction and virtualisation that characterise today’s complex enterprise data centre make it difficult to see clearly into the underlying infrastructure, and impossible to actually guarantee performance.
While those surveyed recognise the value of IPM, there remains a lack of understanding around its functionality. Only around one-third (35%) of respondents say they understand how an IPM solution might help them to understand and resolve infrastructure performance issues associated with virtual and cloud/managed service environments.
Just 13% of respondents say they have a dedicated IPM team at present. Of those who don’t only 23% currently have plans to create a dedicated IPM team.