This article is based on analysis originally published by itweb.co.za, drawing on a Freeform Dynamics 2016 survey of 400 IT professionals across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Is IT Ops Just About Keeping the Lights On?
There is no shortage of conversation about software development and the application economy. But a question that deserves equal attention is whether IT operations is simply a maintenance function—or whether it is as strategically vital as any other part of the business.
The short answer is: IT ops is mission-critical. To understand why, it helps to tackle the single biggest enemy of IT operations: complexity—and the variety of forms it takes.
What the Data Says: IT Is Central to Business Competitiveness
A Freeform Dynamics 2016 survey of 400 IT professionals across the EMEA region examined how demands on IT ops teams in medium and large companies have evolved, and how those teams are responding. IT strategists made up more than 50% of respondents, with IT specialists from a variety of vertical markets rounding out the sample.
The results underlined how deeply embedded IT has become in business operations:
- 82% strongly agreed that IT is critical for companies to differentiate and compete.
- 84% said most of their major business initiatives have a significant IT component.
- 75% agreed that effective competition requires enabling the best possible digital customer experience.
Given this consensus, the pressure on IT ops teams should come as no surprise—yet understanding its root causes is essential for addressing it.
Under Pressure: The Forces Straining IT Ops
The survey identified several primary sources of pressure on IT operations teams:
- 68% of senior IT professionals cited pressure from development teams and agile practices as a leading cause of strain.
- 92% identified escalating compute requirements as a major factor.
- 80% pointed to managing rapid software release and deployment cycles, and co-ordinating on-premises and cloud activities, as significant contributors.
Many of these pressures are structural. IT ops simply does more than it ever has before—faster release cycles, hybrid cloud environments, and growing compute demands are not temporary trends. They are the new baseline.
The Root Causes of IT Complexity
Most IT professionals surveyed acknowledged that their infrastructure was unavoidably complex. In a world demanding speed and efficiency, complexity seems counterproductive—yet it persists. Several controllable and uncontrollable factors contribute:
Controllable Factors
- Limited knowledge: Teams tend to choose familiar technologies—open source or proprietary—that may not be the best fit for enterprise IT at scale.
- Poor communication and unbalanced stakeholder influence: Misalignment between business and IT leads to fragmented decisions.
- Chasing the cheapest option: Short-term cost optimisation often creates long-term technical debt.
- Adopting the latest technology for its own sake: Innovation without clear business justification adds unnecessary complexity.
- Poor procurement disciplines: Inconsistent purchasing decisions result in sprawling, heterogeneous environments.
- Bad skills mix: Gaps between skills available and skills required compound operational challenges.
- Mergers and acquisitions: Integrating disparate IT environments is a perennial source of complexity.
Ongoing Challenges
- Monitoring and management: Despite decades of practice, consistent and effective monitoring remains an ongoing challenge across many organisations.
- Cloud and data security: Protecting data across cloud environments continues to be a significant and evolving problem.
Operational Management Capability: Tooling and Process Matter
Enterprise IT ops requires more than infrastructure—it requires the right processes and tools to monitor and manage complex, dynamic environments. Without them, inefficiencies accumulate rapidly.
Common sources of operational inefficiency include:
- Outdated or inadequate tooling that cannot keep pace with modern infrastructure demands.
- Excessive reliance on manual processes, which introduces human error and slows response times.
- High operational overheads that leave little capacity for proactive improvement work.
The knock-on effects are predictable: more mistakes, slower response to change, and reduced agility—exactly the opposite of what DevOps and agile methodologies demand.
Why Some Organisations Do Better Than Others
The Freeform Dynamics study segmented organisations into three groups: high achievers, mixed achievers, and under-achievers. Clear patterns emerged when comparing performance against infrastructure standardisation and monitoring and management capabilities.
High achievers consistently demonstrated two distinguishing characteristics:
- They had made deliberate, sustained efforts toward infrastructure consistency and standardisation.
- They had invested in superior monitoring and management capabilities.
It is important, however, to keep expectations realistic. A fully standardised infrastructure and a perfect set of processes and tools is an ideal, not an attainable end state. Enterprise IT environments are always in flux—that is not a failure; it is an essential characteristic of keeping pace with business demands.
Modernisation: When Consolidation Pays Off
For organisations where parts of the environment have drifted into a chaotic or unnecessarily complex state, consolidation and modernisation work can deliver convincing returns. This is especially true when the IT team is under pressure to:
- Cut operational overheads
- Innovate more quickly
- Improve service levels, availability and performance
- Reduce operational risk
- Become more responsive to business demands
Finding time and resources for modernisation projects is genuinely difficult. But if a critical part of the IT environment is highly fragmented or dependent on obsolete technology, the cost of inaction—in reduced agility, higher risk, and slower delivery—will continue to compound until the issues are addressed.
IT Ops Is the Foundation of Digital Business Success
Delivering great digital customer experiences does not hinge solely on appealing mobile apps and web interfaces. It depends equally on backend systems that are fast, reliable, secure, and flexible enough to support modern DevOps delivery.
IT ops is unquestionably about keeping the lights on—but it is also as mission-critical as any other component of the DevOps value chain. In an application economy driven by speed and continuous delivery, the stability, consistency, and operational maturity of IT ops is what makes agility possible in the first place.
The evidence from the Freeform Dynamics research is clear: organisations that invest in infrastructure standardisation and strong monitoring and management capabilities consistently outperform those that do not. IT ops is not a cost centre to be minimised—it is a strategic enabler to be invested in.