COVID-19 Pandemic Challenges IT Departments to Support Remote Workers

The COVID-19 pandemic challenges IT departments to support the remote workers with confidence. LogicMonitor research finds that 84% of global IT leaders are responsible for their customers’ digital experience, but three in five (61%) don’t have a high level of confidence in their ability to do so.

That’s according to Evolution of IT Research Report, which the cloud infrastructure monitoring platform provider just released. The commissioned research surveyed 500 IT decision makers across a variety of roles and geographic regions in May and June. The goal was to find out how global IT departments are adapting in the era of remote work.

A second key finding in the research is the accelerated shift to cloud amid the COVID-19 pandemic challenges. The third is around automation. There is overwhelming agreement among IT departments that automation is key to efficiency. As a result, adoption is on the table over the next few years.

LogicMonitor’s Kevin McGibben

“Maintaining business continuity is both more difficult and more important than ever in the era of COVID-19,” said Kevin McGibben, CEO and president of LogicMonitor. “IT teams are being asked to do whatever it takes – from accelerating digital transformation plans to expanding cloud services – to keep people connected and businesses running, as many offices and storefronts pause in-person operations. Our research confirms that the time is now for modern enterprises to build automation into their IT systems and shift workloads to the cloud to safeguard IT resiliency.”

Common Concerns

The report findings echo the sentiments expressed by IT executives at a recent CompTIA Partner Summit session – Preparing for the Next Challenge: Preparedness from Today’s IT Leaders. The session focused on COVID-19 pandemic challenges.

At the virtual summit, a trio of IT executives discussed the impact of the pandemic on their companies and departments, and how they’re rethinking their IT strategies.

Business worldwide took a hit when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. For IT teams, resiliency plans were suddenly in the spotlight. As record numbers of employees were forced to work from home, businesses quickly discovered whether they had the right infrastructure in place to support them.

The LogicMonitor research found that 86% of companies had a business continuity prior to June. The exception was the education sector. Only one in four (24%) IT professionals there reported having a continuity plan.

With or without a business continuity plan in place, IT decision makers had reservations about their IT infrastructure and its resilience in the face of a crisis. One in three (36%) felt “very prepared,” 53% were “somewhat prepared,” 10% reported a small chance of withstanding a crisis and 1% had no confidence in preparedness.

Cloud and Automation

Here are top 5 crisis concerns for IT leaders. This is if people must work remotely or can’t access the office in a reasonable time frame.

1. Having to deal with internet outages or other technical issues remotely (49%).
2. Strain on the network from having too many individuals logging in remotely (49%).
3. Having to deal with coworkers logging in through VPNs (38%).
4. Not being able to access the hardware they need (33%).
5. Teleconference software not being secure enough (28%).

It’s no surprise that accelerated cloud adoption is seen as one strategy for resiliency. Here are some survey results about where workloads reside pre-COVID-19 and will reside post COVID-19.

• Pre-COVID-19, 35% of workloads were on-premises. Post-COVID-19 that number will shrink to 22%.
• Pre-COVID-19, 23% of workloads were in the public cloud. Post-COVID-19 that number will increase to 28%.
• Pre-COVID-19, 25% of workloads were in a private cloud. Post-COVID-19 that number will increase to 30%.
• Pre-COVID-19, 17% of workloads were in a hybrid cloud. Post-COVID-19 that number will increase to 20%.

The lion’s share (94%) of IT leaders surveyed expect IT automation to become a focus in the next three years. In fact, in the midst of a crisis, only 39% of organizations felt “very confident” in their IT department’s ability to maintain continuous uptime and availability. For organizations that have already automated, that percentage rose to 50%.