New Survey Report: The State of IT Infrastructure Management

What is the state of enterprise IT infrastructure, and what insights can we glean from the perspectives of the IT professionals responsible for its management and operation?

To answer these questions and more, INAP surveyed 500 IT professionals with data center, server and cloud infrastructure responsibilities at companies in the U.S. and Canada to create the second annual State of IT Infrastructure Management report.

In this year’s report, we delve further into what’s driving the decline of on-premise data centers and highlight the factors associated with successful infrastructure strategies in the hybrid and multicloud era. Plus, we highlight where the results show an acceleration of the major themes established in last year’s survey.

Download the report below and read on to learn what we discovered.

Key Trends and Takeaways from the Latest Survey

Strategic Room for Improvement

We asked IT pros to assign a letter grade to their current infrastructure strategy and found that a majority of IT pros don’t think their current infrastructure strategies deserves a top grade. Only 1 in 4 (25.2 percent) respondents, gave their infrastructures an A. In the report, we narrow down what factors earned the top grade, and the areas for improvement for those who assigned their infrastructures a lower grade.

The Decline of On-Prem Accelerates

The next three years will see a significant reduction in the number of workloads powered by on-premise data centers or server rooms. Continuing the trend noted in last year’s report, 88 percent of survey participants expect to move at least part of their workloads off-premise over the next three years. Learn which solutions will be top destinations for these latest migrations in the report.

Performance Trumps Economics

Network performance emerges as the top reason for moving more workloads to colocation facilities or the cloud, while economic factors like expected cost savings of closing down on-premise facilities come in fifth. We’ve identified the ‘Big 4’ reasons driving the off-prem migration, all of which make a compelling case for why the death of the on-premise data center is perhaps inevitable within the next decade.

Monitoring Leads List of Routine Time Drains

Nearly half of IT professionals who say infrastructure monitoring is among their job responsibilities feel they are spending too much time on it—the No. 1 time drain for the second consecutive year. We asked these professionals again what they would do if they were able to remove routine activities like server monitoring and maintenance. Last year, the No. 1 answer was reclaiming work-life balance. This year, that answer fell to the No. 3 spot. Learn more about what professionals would do with 16 hours back by downloading the report below.

The Leadership Disconnect

On several issues—department headcount, optimism around strategy, efficacy of hybrid and multicloud—senior IT leaders hold starkly different views than non-senior infrastructure managers. Throughout the report, we explore these disparities and point to potential reasons for these differences in opinion.

Take a Deeper Dive

To read about these insights and more, download the report below—and keep an eye on our ThinkIT blog over the next few weeks as we break down each of these topics in greater depth.