Legacy IT operations management stalls digital development

A new IT Operations Management survey found that enterprises depending exclusively on legacy monitoring tools are falling behind in business agility and operational efficiency. The commissioned study, conducted by Forrester Consulting, uncovered that organizations with disjointed and outdated IT offerings that utilize legacy tools and strategies are trapped in a perpetual survival mode and unable to innovate. Only an alarming 12% of respondents report having fully transitioned to modern monitoring tools, with 37% still relying exclusively on legacy tools keeping them stuck in a digital deadlock. 

Respondents revealed that legacy toolsets remain prevalent in their IT ecosystem, further relaying the negative implications of legacy IT vendors and tools that undermine enterprises service resilience, fast mean-time-to resolution, and the ability to automate to scale. A full 86% said they are still using at least one legacy tool, which is actively exposing their business to negative consequences, primarily high costs of IT support, service degradation, and increased security risks. 

Top findings from the ITOM study include: 

·       A third (33%) of companies are using 20 or more infrastructure and application monitoring tools that contribute to IT complexity; 

·       Legacy tools are causing lengthened service disruptions and poor customer experience, while not supporting the shift to hybrid-cloud environments or new application architectures; 

·       End-to-end visibility into IT assets across hybrid architectures was named a significant technical benefit of AIOps by 49% of respondents;

·       68% of decision-makers cite business agility as the top driver for changes in IT operations.

The Opportunity Ahead

Mature enterprises are attempting to match their digital-native counterparts by adopting cloud-based architectures, but continue to fall short, as many modern tools are unable to manage outdated legacy systems. To address IT visibility and remediation challenges, over two-thirds (68%) of companies surveyed have plans to invest in AIOps-enabled monitoring solutions over the next 12 months. These solutions apply AI/ML-driven analytics to business and operations data to make correlations and provide real-time insights that allow IT operations teams to resolve incidents faster–and avoid incidents altogether. IT decision-makers reported that the major benefits of AIOps solutions include increased operational efficiency and business agility, as well as reduced cost of downtime.

“Enterprises that operate on dozens of legacy vendor tools are siloing the view of their IT environment, leading to prolonged service disruptions, issues with incident resolution, and ultimately, providing for a poor customer experience. These “survival mode enterprises” have little chance of getting ahead of the agility curve and are in real danger of being left behind,” said Dave Link, founder and CEO of ScienceLogic. “As the adoption of newer technologies like containers and microservices continues to rise, forward-thinking companies will drive extensive automation with artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. This study shows that companies will need to adopt innovations like AIOps to ensure a successful modernization and automation journey.” 

“These enterprises are starting to take the leap to modernize their IT environment, however, survival will require a cultural shift in how people and organizations understand the flow and impact of clean data as part of a broader strategy towards automation,” said Link. “The reality is that those who have not started are already behind, but it is not too late to future-proofs your IT systems and teams so they may focus on innovative advancements to propel your enterprise to market success.”