Survey Says: How Will IT Operations Management Change in 2010?

March 17th, 2010 by Larissa Fair

As we come up on FOSE next week, we can’t help but wonder what changes we will see in how government agencies are approaching IT Operations management. With all of the talk about the cloud and data center consolidation, we expect cloud computing initiatives to be at an all-time high.

Each year, we travel to FOSE in the spring and Interop New York in the fall to compare government IT and industry IT viewpoints on a variety of subjects. We track different topics from virtualization to ITIL to green IT in order to compare what’s hot or not and check adoption rates. We have been tracking virtualization for a few years, and just last year saw that it has come of age. This year we expect to see cloud computing continue its upward trend, particularly among creating a government cloud.

We compared our survey from FOSE in 2009 to Interop New York in 2009, and found that there was already an uptick just from last March to November.

In 2009, more than 90% of FOSE survey respondents worked for a federal government agency, or government contractor. The top concern on their mind was budget constraints with 53% worried about how to make ends meet. This may have been due in part to when the surveys were taken: FOSE was held six months after the Wall Street meltdown and two months into the Obama presidency. Interop New York took place a full year after the start of the financial crisis and10 months into the new administration.

In New York, the industry’s biggest challenges were around compliance and new technology and innovation. We think that FOSE attendees may have a new challenge this year, and see their challenge now as compliance around new technology. Consider the impact that cloud computing and virtualization has on FISMA compliance and reporting alone. In fact, we hope to see an increase in the importance of FISMA compliance among this year’s FOSE attendees. Last year only 87% of respondents said that FISMA and security information management are important to their operations, which was down slightly from 2008 where 91% cited FISMA as important. With all the impending changes to government IT operations on the horizon from 2010-2011, we hope that FISMA compliance remains a high priority for government agencies.

Green IT and virtualization also saw a nice increase from FOSE to Interop New York, with 76% at FOSE saying virtualization is important or very important, and 86% at Interop. 70% at Interop New York said that green IT was important to their business, while only 61% of agency IT personnel said that green IT was important to their organization. This year, I think we can expect another increase of importance for virtualization, particularly at FOSE where data center consolidation will be at an all-time high.

But seriously, given all of the non-stop media around cloud computing, we fully expect the cloud to take over our survey this year, especially at FOSE. And this is exciting for us as a company as well, because more and more government agencies are going to be seeking solutions that provide effective monitoring and management of public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds. Companies like CA are snapping up management and monitoring tools faster than you can say “Nim…”. It’s an exciting time for our industry, and we’re looking forward to the new technologies ahead.

We will be at FOSE this year, so please stop by our booth (#2620) next week to complete our survey and receive a free t-shirt! We will also be there to showcase a special preview of our EM7 G3 Integration Server, which will provide a way for government agencies to monitor their public, private and hybrid clouds. Moving towards a government cloud? We’ll show you how to manage it all.

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• June 16, 2010 -- Federal Agencies See the Cloud

Tagged with: Federal IT

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