RESTON, Va. — Internap Corp. (INAP) announced the results of its annual State of IT Infrastructure Management report, which surveyed more than 500 IT professionals about their organization’s current and future plans for IT infrastructure.

While the majority of IT professionals would give their current infrastructure an above-average grade, only one in four would say it’s worthy of an “A.” When asked why their infrastructure didn’t receive top marks, the top two reasons were that the infrastructure is not fully optimized for the organization’s applications and the fact that IT professionals are spending too much time managing and maintaining the infrastructure (both at 42%).

Additionally, 88% with on-premise data centers will be moving at least some of their workloads to the cloud, managed hosting, or colocation in the next three years. Overall, IT professionals expect a 38% reduction in their on-premise workloads by 2022. Where infrastructure is located does have an impact on how IT feels about their systems, as a majority (70%) feel that hybrid and multi-cloud strategies have made management easier to some extent.

With so many organizations migrating their infrastructure, the end for on-premise data centers is likely imminent. The main reasons for this shift are to increase network performance (42%), improve scalability (41%), improve resiliency/availability (41%) and improve security (37%).

“The role of the IT professional is changing, and, for the second consecutive year, they are making it known that they want to lead digital transformation initiatives,” said Jennifer Curry, senior vice president of Global Cloud Services for INAP. “The results show IT professionals would much rather spend their time assessing their systems for outsourcing (cloud readiness) or designing complex multi-service environments rather than performing routine tasks, which can be easily outsourced, such as monitoring their infrastructure. These activities would have a larger business impact and add more value to their organization, so IT leaders should use this as a wake-up call and figure out how to adjust their strategies accordingly.”

Additional findings from the report include:

• The less they manage, the higher the grade. The more companies rely on third parties or cloud providers to fully manage their hosted environments (up to the application layer), the more likely they are to assign their infrastructure strategy an “A.” The average share of workloads fully managed received the following grades: A (71%), B (62%), C (54%).
• Hybrid IT and multi-cloud strategies are here to stay. Roughly 69% already power workloads on more than one platform. Among those who host in the cloud or with managed hosting providers, only one in three organizations (32%) exclusively use one type of hosted environment — e.g., bare metal, private cloud, multitenant public cloud, etc.
• IT frustrations are mounting, but a higher headcount might not be the answer. IT leaders and professionals remain frustrated and increasingly believe their time required on routine upkeep is holding them back (59%). But concerns about their team size or headcount are not the driving factor for this frustration. A majority of IT pros (72%) feel their in-house IT teams are large enough to successfully execute their IT infrastructure strategy.

Survey Methodology
The data reflected in this report was derived from a survey of 508 IT professionals with data center, server, and cloud infrastructure responsibilities who work at businesses and enterprises in the U.S. and Canada with more than 100 employees. The survey, commissioned by INAP and facilitated by Precision Sample, was conducted in October 2019. The margin of error is ±5% at the 90% confidence level.

Access the full report here.