A survey of 1,000 IT professionals in organizations with annual revenue of at least $500 million conducted by AppDynamics, a unit of Cisco Systems, finds nearly three-quarters (74%) report digital transformation projects which typically would take more than a year to be approved are now being signed off on in a matter of weeks.
The research also finds 95% of respondents changed their technology priorities during the pandemic, with 88% identifying digital customer experience as being a priority now.
In addition, some 71% said some digital transformation projects have been implemented within weeks versus the months or years it would have taken to implement a similar initiative before the pandemic. At the same time, 66% of respondents noted the pandemic has exposed weaknesses in their digital strategies, creating an urgent need to accelerate initiatives.
Not surprisingly, the survey also finds 81% of respondents said the pandemic has created the biggest technology pressure their organization has ever experienced, with 61% under more pressure at work than ever before. Almost two-thirds (64%) said they are now being asked to perform tasks and activities they have never done before.
Despite the enormous pressure technologists are facing, 87% said this period of time is an opportunity for technology professionals to show their value to the business. In fact, 80% of survey respondents report that the response of their IT teams to the pandemic has positively changed the perception of IT within their organizations.
The survey specifically identifies managing spikes in website traffic (81%), lack of unified visibility and insight into the performance of the technology stack and its impact on customers (80%) and managing mean time to resolution (MTTR) with a remote IT department (70%) as major challenges.
IT teams during this time need clear goals and objectives (90%), real-time data at the point of need (89%), autonomy and accountability (88%) and the freedom to experiment and take risks (87%), the survey finds.
Angie Mistretta, chief marketing officer at AppDynamics, said the survey mirrored an earlier AppDynamics report that tracked a rise in the use of search terms such as “digital experience monitoring�? and “application performance management (APM).�?
In general, Mistretta said it’s also apparent the rate at which application workloads are moving into the cloud is accelerating as organizations look to deploy more resilient applications based on cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes that are designed from the ground up to access remotely.
It may take time for IT organizations to master cloud-native platforms to deploy microservices-based applications. As such, the number of monolithic applications being lifted and shifted into the cloud remains considerable. Once those applications are shifted, many IT teams will only then start to modernize those applications.
Naturally, AppDynamics is betting many more organizations will require access to an APM platform to navigate this brave new world of legacy and emerging digital business applications in the cloud. The challenge for IT teams, however, is there have never been so many APM options available.
