Priorities Among IT Professionals Not What You Might Expect

Solarwinds has released its 2018 survey of IT professionals. This time, they contacted 803 professionals from North America, the UK and various other points around the globe as to their views on IT priorities now and in the near future.

The conventional wisdom as to priorities focuses on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and blockchain. But there is a hype cycle at work here and with some of these, the cycle has not yet reached the stage of disillusionment. Nevertheless, C-Suites are trying to explore these technologies and how they might help them in their businesses.

IT Professionals, on the other hand are those charged with the job of inplementing technologies, and have a huge say in what ultimately goes live. The survey reveals that Cloud/hybrids are the top priority for this group. Second is the more general category of automation and third is big data analytics. Maybe these technologies are further along than others in the hype cycle. At the bottom of the heap are AI, ML and Blockchain.

What the survey indicates is a certain dissonance between what the C-Suite is looking at and the priorities of the IT Professionals. However, these two groups have a common goal - using technology to maximize productivity and efficiency. The survey may simply be indicating that some technologies are less advanced in terms of implementability than others.

Solarwinds recommends that organizations continue to focus on the development of cloud/hybrid technologies. In particular they emphasize implementation of Containers, which are technologies that improve the abilities of operating systems to share applications most efficiently.

As the report puts it, "investment and skills development perspective. IT professionals must remain grounded in the here and now, understanding that containers represent lower-hanging fruit in terms of investment, requirements, and barrier to consume. Specifically, containers enable application portability and promise consistent deployment, scalability, and development agility—all of which are key benefits in hybrid IT environments."

For the report, check out their site.