Budget, Limited Visibility, and Legacy Systems Among Top Challenges

An uncertain economic climate has many organizations tightening budgets. IT investments are not immune.

• 73% of IT leaders said budget constraint is the number one challenge they face.

A “lack of visibility” (55%) and “legacy systems and technologies” (46%) came in second and third, respectively. These two challenges often go together. Legacy systems—which can lead to integration issues and application and data silos—make visibility harder to achieve.

But the consequences of limited visibility can be far-reaching. Poor visibility makes it challenging to measure application performance and understand the cost of poor performance. A lack of visibility can also create security vulnerabilities and negatively affect the user experience through delays in troubleshooting application performance issues and undetected application outages.

Different Application Environments Create Different Challenges

More than half (53%) of respondents said they are running in a hybrid environment today. The second most common environment was a private data center/private cloud (36%). Only 11% of respondents said their organization runs applications in a public cloud/multi-cloud environment.

Interestingly, the findings also revealed that the type of environment plays a significant role in the challenges organizations encounter. For those running a private data center/private cloud environment, budget, visibility, legacy technology, and security were all significantly bigger challenges to the organization than for those running a hybrid environment.

However, internal processes and governance structures (42%)—and a lack of time or resources (38%)—were significantly more challenging for those with a hybrid environment than for those with a private data center/private cloud environment, which listed those challenges as only 11% and 6%, respectively.

A Hybrid Environment Wins on Visibility

Greater visibility into application workloads provides important advantages. IT teams can see how applications are functioning and take immediate steps to resolve issues. Workload visibility also helps to determine the performance of storage and computing systems under various workload conditions and gives IT the ability to perform workload profiling and modeling to determine which workloads will run best where.

Despite the importance of greater visibility, many organizations continue to struggle to achieve it—and the type of environment they use for application management can have an impact. A lack of visibility was much more significant for those running a private data center/private cloud environment (83%) compared to those running a hybrid environment (30%). This was also true of visibility challenges into application workloads.

Those running applications in hybrid environments reported much higher levels of application workload visibility.

• 36% of those with a hybrid environment reported very high visibility into application workloads versus only 2% of those in a private data center/private cloud environment.

Overall, a significant majority (78%) reported very high or high visibility into application workloads in hybrid environments—and not a single respondent reported low visibility. In contrast, the majority of IT leaders running private data center/private cloud environments reported only moderate visibility (53%).

Strategies for Application Management

Having a robust application management strategy can be critical in keeping up with an increasingly complex and evolving application environment. Having an application rationalization strategy—which is the process of reviewing the application inventory to determine which applications should be retired, retained, reposted, replatformed, refactored, or reimagined in order to optimize cost and performance—is one way organizations can become more efficient in their application management.

Yet, the majority of IT leaders said their organizations (61%) do not have an enterprise-wide application rationalization strategy. The type of environment an organization is using does seem to affect adoption.

• Over half (51%) of those with private data centers reported having an enterprise-wide application rationalization strategy, while only 37% of those with hybrid environments reported an enterprise-wide strategy.

One area where there was significant agreement on application management strategy—regardless of the type of environment an organization is running—is DevOps.

• 93% of organizations said they are using DevOps either across the entire application environment (45%) or in one or more areas (48%).

Building a culture of shared responsibility and transparency, which DevOps facilitates, can help organizations streamline application incident responses and improve collaboration, ensuring operations run smoothly.

Third-Party Resources Highly Valuable

When asked about third-party services value to help support the application environment, 90% or more of IT leaders said they find services—such as application workload assessments (60%), access to application development resources (47%), and DevOps resources (28%)—highly valuable.

Increased productivity/speed was identified as the top benefit (59%) of leveraging third-party services to support application environments. Other benefits included:

• Integration capabilities (46%)
• Improved application security/reduced risk (44%)
• Reduce/control costs (41%)

However, the type of application environment did affect the perception of the greatest advantages of using third-party services. While increasing productivity and speed was the number one advantage across all environments, those running a private data center/private cloud saw it as a bigger advantage. Likewise, integration capabilities, improving application security/reducing risk, and reducing/controlling costs were perceived as more of an advantage by those running a private data center environment.

On the other hand, access to hard-to-source skills and resources, reducing dependency on IT, and access to established approaches/roadmaps were seen as much more of an advantage by those running a hybrid environment. These perceived benefits align closely with the challenges those in hybrid environments say they face.

Final Thoughts

The findings indicate, regardless of the environment an organization is running, that many companies still have room for improvement when it comes to application management. Some organizations could consider switching to a hybrid environment to decrease visibility challenges but should recognize that hybrid environments come with more governance and resource challenges. Overall, the findings showed that most organizations could benefit from increased visibility—such as having a single pane to view the entire application environment, using DevOps across the enterprise, and leveraging third-party services—if they are not already doing so.