Many organisations aren’t getting the best from ITops, according to an annual survey by automation platform provider Automox.
The company’s key finding from their 2024 State of ITops Report is that less than half (44%) of organisations they canvassed reported “a high level of IT agility”, suggesting room to improve that could generate opportunities for the channel to offer support.
Jason Kikta, chief information security officer (CISO) and senior vice president of product at Automox, said agility drives efficiency, which can be defined as cost versus services, balancing price against performance.
“Efficiency has really become the focus of IT over the last couple of decades,” Kikta confirmed in the related State of ITops Report webinar.
David van Heerden, product evangelist at Automox, said agility is that ability to quickly and efficiently adapt to changes in business environments, emerging technologies and customer needs.
“To understand all of these tools and all these different teams is a monumental task for IT,” he said in the webinar.
“It doesn’t really matter what your size is, as an organisation; more than half of the people that we interviewed reported that they were not at a high level of agility, but they all struggled. So even with massive amounts of resources thrown into teams, these are common issues.”
In the 2024 report, 54% of respondents told Automox that there was a lack of tool integration and 44% said that employees were in charge of their own patching and software updates. Just 10% said their endpoint management operations were fully automated.
Tom Bowyer, director of IT security at Automox, suggested that driving efficiencies in IT security needed to be looked at as well, representing opportunity for channel providers — not least because accumulated tech debt makes it more difficult and costly to catch up with technological advances.
“If you’re in business to business sales, security is the new thing. Third party risk is not going away,” Bowyer said.
Every year, Automox surveys about 500 IT professionals about where the IT industry is headed, and how quickly and efficiently teams adapt to change is of course crucial. The vendor defined IT agility as the ability to quickly and efficiently adapt to changes in business environments, emerging technologies, and customer needs.
According to the Automox report, without the speed or flexibility to seamlessly integrate new technologies, organisations can quickly develop a substantial gap between their technology stack and industry standards.
Tools such as AI and workflow automation could assist business adaptability in a changing environment. Highly agile organisations (67%) are more likely to use AI-language models to solve novel problems than those with low agility (39%), the report said.
IT-agile organisations might be able to do things like apply configuration changes or deploy software fast, in under thirty minutes, for example, as well as patching software in a timely manner. At the same time, even already IT-agile companies could improve their performance, it said.
Organisations could identify and eliminate process bottlenecks and time-consuming tasks that could be automated, as well as find and integrated IT tools and technologies that work well together, making for optimum efficiency. Scripting and tooling could automated where possible, with changes measured and tracked, according to Automox.
Automox has just released another set of Worklets for streamlining ITops automation. A MSI Software Installation Worklet helps automate installation of system-wide MSI software, a PowerShell-based Install Font Worklet reduces the labour associated with installing TrueType and OpenType fonts across all endpoints, and another provides for easy updates of Windows 10 to Windows 11.
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