IT Teams Prioritizing Cloud Efficiency, Survey Finds
The Visual One Intelligence survey and accompanying "2024 IT Infrastructure Outlook" report also identified correlations between observability and productivity as well as risks to employee satisfaction.
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A new survey shows that IT infrastructure teams' top priorities today are directly focused on reducing VMware dependency while moving on-premises workloads to the cloud with greater cost efficiency than in the past.
The survey of 315 IT infrastructure and operations professionals in the United States, spanning industries and organizational sizes, revealed that teams' biggest priorities in 2024, in order, are reducing dependency on VMware, migrating from on-premises to cloud infrastructure, and reducing cloud costs.
Traditionally prioritized goals such as reducing downtime and consolidating tools remained important but ranked lower on teams' list of priorities. "There is a growing focus on the 'big fish' of cost savings," said Phil Godwin, president and COO of Visual One Intelligence. With concerns about cloud costs now compounded by VMware cost jumps, "organizations have to prioritize anything that helps achieve long-term cost efficiencies."
As cloud, compute, and hybrid infrastructures get more complex, "streamlined observability will be more important than ever for finding and creating those cost efficiencies." To that end, the survey also revealed correlations between observability and productivity, showing statistically significant levels of productivity loss among respondents who reported spending too much time trying to collect and organize data.
Notably, spending time on reactive and tactical work also correlated with role overload, whereas respondents with enough time to achieve what is expected in their role reported statistically significant levels of job satisfaction. "Teams with less insights into their hybrid infrastructures seem to have less productivity, more stress, and less satisfaction," said Godwin, "whereas more visibility leads to more success and satisfaction."
Results remained steady across small-to-midsize organizations as well as enterprises, with midsize organizations (500-999 employees) showing the strongest correlations. Visual One Intelligence -- a SaaS solution specializing in hybrid infrastructure monitoring, forecasting, and optimization -- conducted the third-party survey in December 2023.
You can view the full survey results in the 2024 IT Infrastructure Outlook here (short registration required).