The single most common issue faced by the IT pros surveyed recently by Kelton Research is network slowdowns or outages, which outstripped application performance problems, availability and even the dreaded “unanticipated change request.”
The study, commissioned by IT performance analysis vendor TeamQuest, tracked the opinions of more than 400 IT management professionals who work at companies with 1,000 or more employees. The findings, which were released today, unsurprisingly centered on the importance of analytics for the data center and the hazards posed by a lack of oversight and IT efficiency.
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But the study also provided a breakdown of the most common day-to-day issues faced by IT types at these relatively large companies, and noted that the average IT manager had to handle eight unpleasant surprises per week, each of which required the attentions of seven staff members.
Network outages and slowdowns were reported by 42% of those, according to the survey, followed by poor application performance and availability issues, at 37% each. Equipment failures cropped up 36% of the time, with unanticipated change requests rounding out the top five at 34%.
The research also pointed to issues with virtual machines and cloud management – 63% of those polled said that they had to deal with cloud outages, and roughly two-thirds of those said that those outages were preventable. More than four in five – 83% - said that they lacked “proper virtual machine management,” and fully nine out of 10 said that a lack of planning made VM management “risky.”
Obviously, vendor-commissioned surveys must be taken with a substantial grain of salt, but the findings do offer some insight, however limited, into the issues faced by a non-trivial number of IT pros.
