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IT pros: Funding is still our biggest hurdle

More than half (52 percent) of higher education IT professionals said funding or budget constraints are a top difficulty when it comes to managing IT operations, according to a new study [1].

As colleges and universities are faced with providing appropriate IT operations solutions and services across various departments, they must learn to address a number of challenges and issues that arise in their quest to deliver top-notch experiences and services to students, faculty and staff.

Only 37 percent of those surveyed said they believe new IT paradigms such as cloud, DevOps, and virtualization are helping make their education organization simpler.

Forty percent of those surveyed cited complexity of IT systems and technology as an IT operations management difficulty, and 35 percent cited integrating multiple technologies.

(Next page: IT challenges and systems complexity)

The survey from Splunk and Clarus Research Group included responses from 234 higher education IT decision makers about their thoughts, feelings and experiences related to their organization’s current IT operations practices.

IT challenges and system complexity

Of surveyed IT professionals, 50 percent said they believe the aforementioned new IT paradigms are adding to their organization’s complexity.

Only 37 percent said they believe these technologies are helping make their education organization simpler.

Fifty percent of respondents said insufficient IT resources such as budget and personnel are one of the biggest challenges to their organizations during the next year; 35 percent cited lack of sophistication and increase in cyber attacks; and 33 percent cited a lack of integration between IT solutions.

Forty-two percent of surveyed respondents said cost savings or avoidance was the top challenge facing their organization’s IT operations, followed by increasing efficiency (31 percent) and implementing new initiatives, directives and mandates (30 percent).

IT security

When it comes to IT security technologies, 81 percent of responding higher education IT professionals said they expect investment in cloud computing to increase over the next year or two, and 75 percent said they are expecting investment in regulatory and compliance management to increase. Seventy-four percent cited real-time monitoring and dashboards as another area of increased investment and focus over the next few years.

Diagnosing IT issues

Nearly half of education respondents (48 percent) said data in different formats and types is a problem when using data to diagnose IT issues. If an interruption in IT systems occurs, only 26 percent of higher education IT respondents agreed that their organization has holistic visibility across IT systems and can foresee problems ahead of time.

Fifty-nine percent said their organization doesn’t have visibility across IT systems.

Sixty-nine percent said if their IT systems experience an interruption or loss of service, they would likely gather information from various systems manually and try to understand what the issue is.

IT operations data

Sixty-four percent of surveyed education IT decisions makers agreed that insights from IT operations data are extremely or very important to their organization’s mission–in fact, 47 percent said insights gained from IT operations data are very important, and 17 percent said they are extremely important.

Forty-three percent of respondents said their organization has enough analytical tools, but those tools are not used to their full potential. Thirty-six percent said they don’t have enough analytical tools but plan to invest in them in the near future. Just 8 percent of respondents said they have enough analytical tools and are fully using those tools.