Enterprise IT organizations are still accelerating or maintaining their digital transformation initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent report found 58% of IT leaders expected to significantly or moderately increase annual technology budgets. Additionally, 73% of IT operations and DevOps team leaders are finding value in their digital products and services during this time.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced enterprise IT organizations to move workforces online while continuing to meet the needs of online customers and partners. The report was conducted by OpsRamp to look at how IT operations leaders are dealing with this new normal.
“Enterprises and their IT organizations are dealing with unpredictable change every day, and how they make decisions now and for the future will play a critical role in their recovery after this pandemic has slowed down,” said Varma Kunaparaju, CEO of OpsRamp. “IT operations and DevOps teams should work with technology vendors and service providers that can help them quickly navigate this landscape with secure, high-performing and cost-efficient capabilities across business applications and infrastructure to weather this economic storm.”
The report did find that 38% of respondents are significantly or moderately looking to reduce technology spending. However, 62% of IT leaders are investing in information security and compliance, 46% are spending on tools to protect remote workers from cyber attacks, big data and analytics, and 45% are investing in public and multi-cloud infrastructure for on-demand computing power.
Performance monitoring has also become a top priority as employees are working from home. Sixty-nine percent of respondents are investing in AIOps, 51% on tools for visibility into distributed microservice apps, and 51% on network performance monitoring and diagnostics tools
The report also find leaders are finding creative ways to bring down costs. Sixty percent are investing in self-service technologies, 59% on technology vendor consolidation and 58% are partnering with managed service providers.
Other findings include 68% of respondents are looking to hire more IT financial analysts, 53% are hiring cloud architects, 50% hiring DevOps engineers, and 47% hiring data scientists.
“Clearly, the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have heightened the need for and value of technology in our society. Online activity has exploded, yet the Internet and the major cloud providers have held up remarkably well in the face of this sudden, long-lasting spike in demand. Companies making online collaboration and self-service tools are in superb positions for growth, as are makers of the core infrastructure technologies that run the critical applications and web sites that people are depending upon so much right now,” the company wrote in a post.
