Survey: Hybrid IT Dominates Public Sector Organizations

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A new survey released by SolarWinds, a provider of IT management software, shows that the vast majority of government agencies have shifted away from on-premises-only infrastructures towards hybrid IT environments, creating new concerns and pressures for IT departments.The findings of this year’s report are based on a survey fielded in December 2015, which yielded responses from 116 IT practitioners, managers and directors in the U.S. and Canada from public sector small, mid-size and large organizations.

According to the results, 62 percent of respondents say it is unlikely that all of their organizations’ infrastructure will ever be migrated to the cloud, meaning that hybrid solutions are likely to dominate on a permanent basis. Additionally, only 41 percent estimate that half or more of their organizations’ total IT infrastructure will be in the cloud within the next 3-5 years.

IT professionals in the survey said that security remains a top concern when it comes to moving processes, programs and other critical infrastructure to a cloud environment. 63 percent say that security is the biggest challenge associated with managing current hybrid IT environments.

So when IT professionals are moving operations over, what are they picking to move first? Data shows that the top three areas of infrastructure with the highest priority for continued or future migration by weighted rank are applications, databases, and security (testing-as-a-service), respectively.

Another barrier to migration is finding people with the right skill sets to make the move. Only 29 percent are certain their IT organizations currently have adequate resources to manage a hybrid IT environment. Hiring for public sector IT positions is a common problem at the state and local government level and in many cases those with the best skills are able to work for much higher salaries than they would be offered taking a government position.

Respondents cited hybrid IT monitoring/management tools and metrics (44 percent), application migration (43 percent), service-oriented architectures/distributed architectures (tied at 31 percent) and automation/vendor management (tied at 30 percent) as the top five skills needed to better manage hybrid IT environments.

“The findings of this year’s study paint a clear picture: cloud adoption is nearly ubiquitous, but it’s not now and will not in the foreseeable future be suitable for all workloads,” said Joel Dolisy, CIO, SolarWinds. “In short, IT is everywhere. Effectively managing and monitoring the new environment — from on-premises to the cloud with multiplying endpoints — to be able to act when needed is more critical now than ever.”

Read the full results of the survey here.