The evolving digital landscape poses many challenges to IT teams as they are responsible for maintaining and upgrading systems and assisting users with technological malfunctions. Auvik recently surveyed 2000+ IT professionals to uncover the current trends in their field. Based on its IT Trends 2024: Industry Report, IT teams face significant challenges in keeping up with the demands, while executives report a higher level of confidence and execution of tasks, which highlights a discrepancy between leadership perceptions and actual technician practices.
Moreover, 64% of the surveyed IT professionals spend between 10 and 20 hours a week on the most tedious undertakings like onboarding users, name changes, department changes, and software provisioning. This ratio signifies a huge drain on resources and explains why they struggle to prioritize more proactive planning.
The Influx of Digital Friction Due to Hybrid IT
In the post-pandemic world, many companies have opted to adopt a hybrid work model, resulting in divergent infrastructures. According to Scalable, the rapid adoption of hybrid work models has overburdened companies with digital friction. Many have welcomed and embraced the influx of new applications even when they have overlapping functions. Companies should consider whether these tools help or hinder employees from fulfilling their tasks. This shift also leads to complex configurations and poor visibility across IT environments as IT teams struggle to manage software and hardware integrations due to routinary end-user requests.
Shifting to hybrid IT means data gets stored in different locations, and workloads are scattered across different environments. IT teams are now managing more divergent infrastructures. They must find ways to integrate and orchestrate actions across networks, endpoints, and SaaS applications, ensuring no delays, disruptions, or security risks affect company operations. They need a toolset that can support multiple IT environments.
For example, a cloud-based network management software provides real-time visibility and control over hybrid IT infrastructure. It pools and organizes IT assets across hybrid environments, so IT teams can keep employees connected to business-critical resources and protected from unnecessary downtime.
Any technological downtime impacts the productivity of employees and sales of a business. Automated solutions can replace an IT professional's manual work, like onboarding new hires and staying on top of patches, updates, and configuration changes. While these tasks are vital to maintaining operational efficiency, they cost time and cause mental fatigue since these activities are demanding in nature. Leveraging IT automation paves the way for companies to achieve frictionless IT.
What is friction in IT?
Friction refers to the resistance end-users face or challenges when using a platform or an application. Gartner, a technological research and consulting firm, describes the term as "the unnecessary effort an employee has to exert to use data or technology to work." According to the firm, digital friction comes from these top 5 sources: low data quality, poor user experience, complex and consistent workflows, mundane and repetitive tasks, and leadership understanding of technology's impact. Based on this information, it is evident that IT teams encounter and experience more digital friction than other roles as they ensure that technology and systems work across other departments.
According to a survey done by Foundry, 27% of their respondents reported suffering from increased security risks due to the challenge of granting role-based access to data across multiple application silos, which is another source of friction. There are regulations, standards, and practices organizations must adhere to ensure the security, integrity, and reliability of their IT infrastructure. IT teams strain themselves as they attempt to meet regulatory requirements for data protection while keeping the networks and users safe from cyber attacks.
The business impacts caused by digital friction are real and extensive. The survey also showed that 58% of the respondents said they lost business opportunities because of the inability to access data in a timely manner. Midsize organizations are more vulnerable to the consequences of digital friction since they have fewer automated processes and less extensive financial resources to invest in solutions for remediating digital friction.
The question now begs to be asked: what can be done to relieve this burden off them? The answer lies in automation.
Automation: The Answer to Removing Friction
Automation can keep IT teams agile and responsive to changes across distributed networks, applications, and endpoints. It minimizes user input. Some tools can completely eliminate the need for manual effort. Since the technology is consistent in its performance, organizations that maximize its ability can expend fewer resources.
IT automation relies on software tools to perform a series of actions and responses on behalf of the IT professional. Using a tool like Auvik gives them more time to focus on higher-level initiatives since it automates mapping, inventory, and documentation. It eliminates the need for manual tracking, ensuring everything stays up-to-date.
Tracking changes manually has some drawbacks, as the practice is time-consuming, error-prone, and inconsistent. Network documentation, in particular, covers different types of documents like device lists, configuration files, network diagrams, etc. It can also change frequently due to network growth. IT teams can overcome these drawbacks with automation.
Documentation and Inventory
Auvik automates documentation for all application and network devices as it continuously monitors the application and network environments, ensuring any changes are reflected in the inventory.
Auvik catalogs all installed applications on the network, detailing the active users, source, lifecycle, risk levels, etc. Automating the inventory record helps companies optimize costs, manage security risks, make informed decisions about infrastructural upgrades, and maintain compliance and regulatory requirements.
This tool also uses network protocols to detect and capture full details for every device on the network. An automated inventory speeds up the discovery process, so IT teams spend less time combing hundreds of devices through intelligent search.
Troubleshooting Issues
Auvik also contains over 50 pre-configured alerts as soon as the network management platform is deployed. It displays the logs on a centralized dashboard, which offers more contexts so admins can quickly troubleshoot network issues.
Admins can also define these alerts before they conduct a prescribed series of detailed actions invoked manually or activated by an external trigger. Auvik responds based on the set trigger condition, automatically mitigating network issues faster. These alerts also apply to SaaS applications as users receive alerts in real-time when new applications are discovered, ensuring they maintain an accurate software inventory record and a secure and well-managed application system.
Configuration Management
IT teams can also utilize automation tools to detect changes in the server's configuration. Auvik can oversee the configuration of systems, software, and other infrastructure components. There is no longer a need to go from device to device to find the differences in the configuration elements and figure out what has been added, edited, or removed.
Otherwise, it becomes difficult for users to identify what's changed between the configurations, as this requires a manual comparison between each device's version histories. The network monitoring tool logs the old configuration into a version index, lessening friction.
Besides configuration management, IT automation also covers application deployment, resource provisioning, etc. The technology partially relieves IT teams of the burden of doing complex and labor-intensive work.
Automation increases an IT team's productivity and efficiency, as it takes over IT operations like monitoring network issues in real-time or documenting SaaS vendor security incidents. IT professionals can instead develop new features for a SaaS application, improve their skills in cloud management, or any initiative that propels the company forward and gives them a competitive advantage.
Conclusion
Addressing digital friction in the modern workplace does not require using multiple tools as these keep IT teams from focusing on higher-level initiatives, like upskilling and increasing speed-to-market, that can move the needle for the company and its employees. IT automation cuts back the manpower needed to perform IT tasks. It streamlines business processes and supports IT teams so they can keep up with the increasing scale and complexity of their operations outside of technical support.
Removing friction across IT environments begins by having full visibility. Auvik empowers IT teams to manage networks, endpoints, and business applications by automating discovery, monitoring, and inventory. Achieve total network transparency with an enterprise-class IT automation tool.
