Customers struggling with IT complexity

An increasingly complex IT landscape has left many customers struggling to keep up and has underlined the attractions of working with a skilled channel partner.

Research from Daisy Corporate Services, Faster, greener, cheaper – dealing with IT infrastructure complexity in a hybrid cloud world, has lifted the lid on the extent of the challenge that most users face trying to keep on top of the IT estate.

The headline finding from the channel player’s investigations is that 90% of those in IT leadership positions feel the technology landscape has become more complex, making it harder to build, manage and maintain systems.

There were also signs that some of the decisions made to keep the lights on in the pandemic are now negatively affecting management efforts. A significant number of those quizzed (62%) felt that they had ended up with a hybrid cloud environment by accident rather than design.

The channel is awash with talk of the benefits of generative AI, with vendors across the board proclaiming it as a pivotal moment for customers to finally unlock insights from all of the data they have been gathering on their systems.

But at a customer level, the prospect of AI is filling some of those running IT departments with concern that growth of AI-related workloads will add more burden to existing infrastructure.

“The IT landscape has changed significantly for businesses in the past five years. Investment decisions were made quickly during the pandemic to support flexible working and to make sure day-to-day operations could continue,” said Andy Bevan, head of propositions and strategy consulting at Daisy Corporate Services.

“But many of these ‘temporary’ add-ons have become embedded, leading to additional IT complexity. This has created a significant challenge for organisations, with 89% of IT decision-makers identifying the need to simplify IT infrastructure management as a priority,” he said.

The channel has already encountered customers revaluating their pandemic tech choices in segments including AV. One of the concerns customers related to Daisy was the fear that a complex IT estate would undermine future efforts to increase digitisation and move more processes to the cloud.

Daisy found that only 30% of those IT leaders it spoke to felt that their current infrastructure was “very effective” in adjusting to workload demands.

As a result, 77% felt that the business was unable to quickly meet demands – and that was before further digital transformation and GenAI had an impact.

“The IT infrastructure of any business is essential to achieving sustained success. Many organisations are embracing cloud to improve speed, flexibility and agility, but have found it difficult to move wholesale to the cloud. This is typically because of an overly complex IT landscape, combined with the burden of legacy infrastructure and applications that simply cannot be migrated,” said Bevan.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that organisations need platforms that can manage hybrid environments end-to-end, providing IT teams with the visibility to effectively meet business needs,” he added.