Confidence in federal IT operations is declining, says survey

There is a lack of confidence in the information technology operations of organizations in the public sector that are undergoing a digital transformation. According to the 2017 Splunk Public Sector IT Operations Survey, about 60 percent of those polled indicated that they either had the same level of confidence in the IT operations than they did last year, or they lost confidence in IT operations.

Operations in question include the ability to ensure availability and performance levels meet requirements; being able to quickly pin-point sources of failures; ensuring efficient operations; and handling large, complicated operations.

The amount of time needed to resolve system outages — an average of 44 hours with 12.5 staff members — does not help to improve confidences. This excessive time is a result of various issues, such as system and technology integration, too many security alerts and a lack of visibility.

“There’s no question that a lack of visibility is a major factor shaking the confidence of IT operations staff and management,” said Kevin Davis, vice president of the public sector at Splunk. “A majority of IT decision makers do not think or are unsure if challenges such as IT troubleshooting, service monitoring, security and business and mission analytics can be addressed using a single set of data.”

This confidence gap is a map to industry and government technology trends that are getting public scrutiny, resource limitations and increasing expectations of technology, Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, said of the survey’s findings. “It’s a challenging time to work in government IT, but there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful for the future. It’s not surprising public sector IT leaders are looking to analytics, cloud and DevOps to help accelerate IT performance and management.”

Despite the lack of confidence in IT operations, about half of the respondents were optimistic when thinking about the future of DevOps, anticipating an increase in spending throughout the next year.

The 2017 Splunk Pubic Sector IT Operations Survey polled nearly 1,250 decision makers and managers from IT positions in agencies with a minimum of 100 employees across the global public sector. The results of the survey contain a margin of error equal to +/- 3.8 percent and a confidence level of 95 percent.

For more information or to view the whole survey, go here.

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