Tech Advisors’ Role in a New Networking Environment
As executives at network monitoring company Auvik succinctly state in the company’s 2024 edition of its annual IT trends report, current movements “collectively paint a rapidly evolving networking landscape” for network and IT administrators. Faced with shifts in attention and resources to the edge and cloud; sprawling tool sets and workforces; increasingly complex technologies and an accelerated pace of innovations, all compounded by pervasive staff shortages, both technology buyers and providers face “a meaningful shift from historic spending priorities and provider preferences,” concurred McKinsey analysts in the firm’s technology and telecom buyers survey. It all comes “with the potential to reshape the markets over the coming year,” continued McKinsey.
The good news is, greater technical complexity generally benefits trusted advisors and indirect channel contestants, as it presumably places greater reliance on their advice and technical acumen. This is not at all lost on channel partners, who cited “growing complexity of tech creating demand” as the number one factor contributing to a healthy IT channel in CompTIA’s 2024 state of the channel study. At 60 percent of respondents, it just nudged out the adoption of generative AI (59 percent) as the top potential growth driver.
There are some questions, however, as to how trusted providers’ role might evolve within the buyers rapidly changing realities and where new values might be provided beyond cost savings. Answers can be gleaned by examining the priorities, challenges and wish lists of network and IT executives and administrators.
“Adapting to evolving market demands will be our biggest challenge and area of opportunity for the future of the IT channel,” said Hannah O’Donnell, vice president of sales at GreatAmerica Financial Services and chair of the CompTIA Community, North America, in the groups state of IT report.
Likely a surprise to no one, issues around cybersecurity almost universally appear at or near the top of any list detailing the priorities and concerns facing IT decision makers. In Auvik’s beginning-of-the-year survey of more than 2,100 IT professionals, for example, both cloud security and network security were the top two priorities for respondents 2024 roadmaps. Endpoint security patching, along with cloud management, were not far behind.
Likewise, a Jumpcloud poll asking small and mid-sized enterprise IT departments to name the biggest challenges to IT teams in Q1 2024 also placed security at the top of the list, ahead of other concerns such as new service rollouts, costs and device and worker sprawl – by large margins.
Incidentally, “better security,” along with “improving IT effectiveness,” were listed as the top benefits of outsourcing to an MSP by respondents to the Jumpcloud survey, topping cost-savings by about 20 percentage points (56 percent to 37 percent.)
Turning to enterprise spending and budgets, security also was cited most often as a category of technology or telecom that will see increased spending in 2024, according to a McKinsey survey of more than 3,000 business decision makers in charge of telecom spending. With 69 percent of respondents planning increases in security spend during the next 12 months, it topped other hot categories such as cloud (67 percent), IoT (65 percent) and next-gen connectivity (64 percent).
“The days of table stakes product selling of antivirus and firewall packages is unlikely to be enough for firms that really want to drive revenue from cybersecurity pursuits,” said CompTIA researchers.
According to CompTIA, partner organizations that say they are in better shape today than two years ago singled out offering cybersecurity services (separately from any solution provider activity) by a wide margin over companies that reported being in the same or worse shape. Forty-four percent of the former group vs. 26 percent of the latter count cybersecurity services as a main business line.
“Before generative AI devoured much of the tech industry hype in 2023, cybersecurity was the main stage player, and it still is in terms of its importance/need among customers and its revenue-driving ability for the channel,” continued the IT association.
EX/CX as X Factors
While the concerns and opportunities around cybersecurity encompass a lot of solutions areas and scenarios – from the cloud and network down to the device to compliance, training, awareness and insurance – one area in which IT departments are screaming for assistance in some ways represents the unintended consequences of “locking things down.”
It’s generally assumed that the more security that is applied, the more cumbersome the user and customer experience becomes. This may be a harsh reality that IT departments must face, but it’s a reality that is of increasing consequence to IT departments, and it could be one area in which partner providers and trusted advisors can stand out, suggest Auvik’s findings.
That’s largely because, right along with their concerns around cybersecurity and the increasingly complex attack surface, both IT and C-suite executives have shown a heightened awareness around user and customer experience. According to findings from Info-Tech Research Group, exponentially improving customer experience is among the top five priorities of CIOs for 2024 – along with often-stated objectives such as leveraging generative AI, updating risk assessments and amping innovation. Indeed, an enhanced experience is often inherent to digital transformation strategies and is precisely where much of the earliest investments in AI have been directed.
It’s not hard to understand why customer and employee experience are being prioritized. According to the Auvik survey, nearly four of 10 respondents said customer/user satisfaction is “most important” in how IT professionals are evaluated on their work. More the eight in 10 said it was very or most important. That was enough to make customer/user satisfaction the top parameter for how IT professionals are evaluated, ahead even of factors such as number and severity of incidents, percentage of uptime/downtime and cost of IT overall.
“Interestingly, C-suite roles are more likely to list customer satisfaction as the most important metric (46 percent), compared to technicians (26 percent), IT operations managers (33 percent) and VP/directors (38 percent),” said the Auvik industry report, “suggesting that the higher you go in the organization, the more the customers’ experiences are emphasized.”
And the importance of experience isn’t just a subjective notion. Auvik also found that the majority (64 percent) of internal IT departments spend between 10 to 20 hours per week resolving end-user requests, while a whopping 16 percent spend more than 20 hours a week on these reactive tasks. Almost half (47 percent) of government IT pros, for one, report spending more than 20 hours a week on end-user requests.
“One answer for how to improve the balance between resolving high-priority items and giving end-users a great experience may lie in outsourcing some IT tasks to an MSP,” surmised Auvik researchers. That could have something to do with why configuration, monitoring and troubleshooting are among top networking tasks outsourced by respondents to MSPs and trusted advisors.
Slowing the Sprawl
Often directly related to employee experience, corporate networks are connecting to an expanding number of tools, devices and applications, both locally and in the cloud. And whether those tools fall under the category of shadow IT or sanctioned and certified resources, IT departments admit they are challenged to contain and maintain the ongoing sprawl.
Nearly half of IT pros, for starters, (45 percent) require five to 10 tools to manage worker lifecycle, according to Jumpcloud’s findings, while more than a quarter (28 percent) require 11 applications or more and 10 percent require more than 15. In turn, a full 84 percent of IT pros said they would prefer to use a single platform that consolidates multiple solutions into one interface to manage user identity, access and security over a mix of best-in-class point solutions – an increase from the 75 percent who expressed the same in Q1 2024.
At the same time, Enterprise Strategy Group, in a survey performed for network performance company Viavi Solutions, found that 65 percent of IT departments are using seven or more tools to monitor network performance, with 38 percent using 11 or more and the overall average at nearly 10 network monitoring tools in use.
While it’s necessary, as ESG analysis point out, to have some mix of tools to adequately cover the many inter-related technologies that comprise today’s IT infrastructure, and having a lot of monitoring tools can have benefits – such as greater detailed visibility across distributed, heterogeneous infrastructures – too many tools also bring disadvantages, such as inefficiencies and a higher total cost of ownership.
“Some have so many [tools in place] they need dedicated roles just to keep up with tool sourcing and maintenance,” said the Viavi study, while it’s not uncommon for organizations to have duplicate tools.
“While having more tools may improve end-to-end visibility and supports remote workers, it becomes a serious liability for integrating new technologies and services,” the report continued. “And those with more than 10 tools were 64 percent more likely to struggle with comprehensive or automated analysis, such as machine learning (ML) and AIOps.”
At the same time, respondents with 10 or fewer tools saw significantly shorter MTTR (mean time to repair) than their peers with 11 or more tools, which dropped from an average of 13.7 hours down to an average of 5.7 hours – a nearly 60 percent reduction.
Moving downstream toward employee users, corporate IT departments face similar challenges when it comes to shadow IT and the sprawl of SaaS applications being used. According to Auvik’s survey, nearly three in five organizations are using more than 50 SaaS applications, while two in five have more than 100 SaaS applications in use by employee teams. The larger the organization, the higher number of SaaS applications in use, while the smaller the organization, the more likely it is to have no idea how many SaaS applications are being used by its workforce. Across all respondents, nearly two-thirds of IT departments report limited to zero visibility into shadow IT application adoption, while a majority admit to little or zero visibility into account access login to all SaaS applications or the level of employees sharing accounts.
In turn, a full 84 percent of companies surveyed by Jumpcloud are very or somewhat concerned about applications and resources managed outside of IT, while shadow IT specifically was listed among the top three security concerns. All the while, IT organizations report a myriad of reasons for why shadow IT looms so large, from a lack of visibility of the applications in use and a lack of SaaS or access management tools to business users moving too fast and inadequate communication with business partners.
This all could be why “SaaS monitoring and management” topped the list when IT pros were surveyed by Auvik about planned investment during the next 12 months and presented with an assortment of choices, which also included “cloud monitoring and management,” “networking automation” and “SD-WAN.”
Interestingly enough, the responsibility of monitoring and managing SaaS applications and the IT end user experience is “up for grabs,” Auvik researchers suggest. For a quarter of respondents, the responsibility lies with general IT, while about one in five say network operations and 18 percent say network security. All told, any of about six roles could be responsible for supporting end users, their workstations and SaaS applications.
IT Wishlist
Also instructive as to where outsourced partners fit into today’s networking realities is the wish lists of IT administrators. When Auvik asked IT pros what network-related task they would like to be doing but aren’t, researching new technology was at the top of list, named by 43 percent of respondents. The number one thing keeping IT professionals from this desired activity, not surprisingly, was a lack of time.
Similarly, when Jumpcloud asked SME IT decision-makers to name the benefits of working with MSP partners, “they are up to date on the latest technology,” named by 55 percent of respondents, was second only to “they are cost-effective,” cited by 58 percent. The importance of such expertise, and the guidance it can afford, should not be underestimated. After all, the rollout of new solutions was the number two challenge cited by SME IT departments, behind only security.
Certainly, the accelerated rate of innovation along with the growling complexity of business technology that IT departments face can be directly correlated to any challenges related to keeping up with and integrating new solutions. Also at play, no doubt, is the ongoing shortage of skilled IT professionals, which was named as a top challenge by half of the IT administrators surveyed by Auvik, just nudging out “budget/cost” for number one on the list.
Taken together, these trends point to an increased reliance on competent sales representatives and the advice of a trusted partner. They are also why analyst firms such as McKinsey view channel partners among the contestants “well positioned to capture a higher share” of market growth in connectivity and other core business services.
