A new report has found the move towards remote work in the United States is proving a major challenge for information technology professionals seeking to keep public sector networks secure.
The report, from IT firm SolarWinds, indicated 52 per cent of public sector IT professionals believed the acceleration of hybrid IT environments had increased the complexity of their organisation’s management.
Nearly half (49 per cent) of respondents said they had visibility only into about half or less of their applications or infrastructure, and 64 per cent of those respondents further pointed to an “inability to detect anomalies or perform easy root-cause analysis” as key factors that limited visibility.
Chief Executive of SolarWinds, Sudhakar Ramakrishna said operational complexity prevented organisations from capitalising on their technology-driven transformation and investments, and delivering benefits for end users.
“As organisations look beyond the pandemic, they must re-examine their investments from the past few years,” Mr Ramakrishna (pictured) said.
“Part of that requires organisations to have visibility into their IT environments to understand what’s working and not working, and where to prioritise their efforts.”
Among those surveyed, only nine per cent said they felt “extremely confident” about their public sector organisation’s ability to manage IT complexity, and fewer than one third (28 per cent) said they were somewhat confident they could manage complexity.
Four per cent said they were not confident at all.
Mr Ramakrishna said complexities increased as more personal devices connected to networks remotely and as workloads and applications operated off both cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
Respondents to the survey also reported lack of budget (44 per cent), lack of implementation resources – including staff (41 per cent) – and time constraints (38 per cent) as the largest barriers to improving visibility and implementing observability.
Washington, 19 June 2022
