IT is now an innovator as well as a caretaker in mid-market organisations, but increased pressure is driving teams towards burnout

Maidenhead, UK – 12 November 2020 – Increasing pressure on IT teams is pushing many IT decision-makers to the brink of burnout, according to new research from Pulsant, a leading UK provider of regional data centre and cloud infrastructure services.

Nearly two-thirds of UK IT decision-makers (65%) have felt under increasing pressure to keep the organisation running effectively over the past 12 months, with 80% of these admitting this has harmed their health and wellbeing.

The research, which was conducted on 201 UK IT decision-makers in mid-market organisations, finds increased pressure on IT has manifested in various ways: 40% of IT decision-makers impacted say they are experiencing anxiety as a result of increased pressure; over a third (35%) are suffering from increased stress which is unsustainable and will result in burn out if not addressed, and nearly a quarter (24%) have experienced burn out which has resulted with absence from the business. Plus worryingly for businesses, 20% have either resigned or started looking for a new job.

The rise in pressure could be due to an increase in expectations with 77% of IT decision-makers saying expectations of IT have risen within their organisation in the past 12 months. The biggest reasons for this increase were noted as a greater focus on security and compliance (45%), the expectation for IT to work with more areas of the business (39%), the expectation for IT to support and have knowledge of a broader range of technologies (38%), increased pressure to update ageing infrastructure (36%) and being expected to deliver projects quicker (35%).

This, in turn, means that IT teams are left stretched across a wide range of responsibilities, with over a third (34%) of IT decision-makers saying too much workload/not enough time is one of the top challenges within their teams.

“An accelerating pace of change means that IT teams are under more pressure than ever to support more critical business initiatives and deliver results faster, while at the same time ensuring business systems remain available, secure and compliant,” says Pulsant CTO, Simon Michie. “This can place IT teams under immense strain which is detrimental to both the success of the business, and more importantly employee wellbeing, with staff left stressed, anxious and having to take time out from the business. “

The research also revealed a divide in opinions on the purpose of IT, with IT seen as both a caretaker of information and technology and also the driver of innovation across the business. Over half of IT decision-makers (58%) and business leaders (55%) believe the primary role of IT is either a help desk or technical support function or to be responsible for maintaining and running business-critical systems, while 40% of IT decision-makers and 45% of business leaders see the main role of the IT department as an enabler of innovation.

IT has also become influential in board-level business decision making with the majority (87%) of IT decision-makers saying IT is involved in setting the business strategy for the year ahead. An overwhelming majority (93%) say their organisation has a representative from the IT team on the board/leadership team, highlighting that IT is now widely regarded as a critical function.

However, while there is clear recognition for the role of IT in driving the business strategy and innovation, IT teams face challenges in delivering on expectations. Nearly two-thirds of IT decision-makers (65%) say their team is under pressure to be more innovative but there is not enough investment for this to be possible. IT decision-makers are also put off from driving new ideas forward by challenges including conflicting priorities (38%), lack of resource (36%) and time (35%).

“It’s hugely positive that both business leaders and IT decision-makers recognise the role of IT in driving innovation, but it’s clear that more attention needs to be paid to providing the IT team with the right support and resources it needs to perform both functions effectively and maintain the wellbeing of IT professionals,” concludes Michie.”

The research was conducted by Censuswide on 201 IT decision-makers and 200 business leaders in UK mid-sized companies (200-2,500 employees). The full report – The IT Paradox: Balancing support and innovation – and further insight into the findings can be found here.

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Traditionally IT has been regarded as a function that keeps businesses running. Anyone working in IT might tell you otherwise, but until recently this has been the purpose that IT teams have been associated with. However, with digital transformation rapidly climbing to the top of the agenda for many organisations, spurred on even more by Covid-19, IT teams are also being expected to help drive the business forward through technological innovation.

The struggle to balance support and innovation has created a confused sense of purpose for IT teams. This paradox poses a risk to IT’s ability to both support the business and deliver meaningful digital transformation projects. In recognition of this, we recently commissioned a study of 201 IT decision-makers and 200 business leaders in UK mid-sized companies (200-2,500 employees) to understand whether it’s time for the IT function to renew its core purpose and who, other than the CIO, can bring the technology function back together with the business support and innovation imperatives.

Here are our key takeaways from the research report: The IT Paradox: Balancing support and innovation.

1. From ‘Information and Technology’ to ‘Innovation and Transformation’

IT decision-makers and business leaders are in close agreement that their organisations see IT as an enabler facilitating innovation and driving the achievement of business goals, signalling that the purpose of IT is now largely to facilitate innovation and transformation.

Nearly half of IT decision-makers believe IT should be responsible for innovation and over half of business leaders see innovation as the main value of IT. However, that’s not to say its historic function is forgotten, with a large percentage of IT decision-makers and business leaders still seeing IT’s primary role as either a help desk and technical support function or to be responsible for maintaining and running business-critical systems.

Clearly IT has a new sense of direction as the driver of innovation across the business, but it hasn’t shaken its traditional function of keeping the business running and IT teams are having to strike a balance between these two roles.

2. Boardroom influence and authority over budgets

According to our research, the majority of mid-sized companies now have an IT representative on the board and have been given more authority when it comes to approving spend. Boardroom influence and autonomy over departmental budgets for IT leaders are both clear signs that IT is now regarded as key to the direction of the business rather than just a function that keeps technologies and systems ticking over day-to-day. As transformation projects become increasingly important, IT leaders are being called upon to help steer the business strategy from a technology perspective.

3. Rising expectations as new business challenges emerge

However, as the importance of IT grows and the remit of the role involves, so too is the pressure on IT teams. The vast majority of IT decision-makers say their organisation’s expectations of IT have increased in the last 12 months, with areas such as improving security and compliance, working with more areas of the business and supporting and having knowledge of a broader range of technologies key areas of pressure.As a result, nearly two thirds of IT decision-makers admitted to feeling under increasing pressure to keep their organisation running effectively in the last 12 months (outside of COVID-19) and for the majority this has had a negative personal impact.

It’s clear that IT has a new purpose. Business leaders and IT decision-makers see IT as the driver of innovation but also acknowledge that it must balance this with being the ‘caretaker’ of technology and systems. IT teams should feel empowered by this new recognition, but business leaders need to consider the impact on their IT departments as they attempt to balance both their new and existing purposes.

Want to learn more about the research results and how IT departments across the UK are faring? Download the full report here.

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Partnership enables businesses to benefit from fast, flexible, and high-performance connectivity for optimised cloud strategies.

Maidenhead, UK – 30 July 2020 –  Pulsant, a leading UK provider of regional data centre, cloud and managed services, has partnered with Megaport, a leading Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) provider, to strengthen connectivity for hybrid and multi-cloud solutions.

Leveraging Megaport’s software defined network (SDN), Pulsant customers can now connect their infrastructure directly to Megaport points of presence housed within Pulsant data centres in Milton Keynes, South London and Edinburgh South Gyle, to access a multi-cloud ecosystem.

Delivered via Pulsant’s Cloud Connect service and through Megaport’s scalable, private network, customers can connect to over 360 service providers, including major hyperscalers like Alibaba, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Nutanix, Oracle Cloud, Salesforce, and SAP via a single port. Customers can benefit from secure, fast and flexible connectivity across regions, countries and continents, enabling organisations to scale their business faster, access new markets and deliver local services to global clients.

“Scalable connectivity between the data centre and the public cloud is now a prerequisite for modern businesses with hybrid and multi-cloud solutions. Through our Megaport Connected solution customers can now directly connect to public cloud environments from a network of regional data centres, enabling them to move their data fast and securely on a low latency, high capacity network, across and out of the UK” comments Simon Michie, CTO, Pulsant.

“Customers also increasingly need the flexibility to scale cloud consumption in line with their needs. With Pulsant Cloud Connect, we have designed a service which is fully managed and monitored, can scale up and down quickly as demand changes, and can be provisioned very quickly,” concludes Michie.

Cloud Connect can be used by customers who have a fully managed service from Pulsant or colocated infrastructure in Pulsant’s data centres. Fully-managed connectivity to Azure and AWS is provided by Pulsant with alternative Megaport supported clouds offered on an unmanaged service.

“Pulsant has established a very strong portfolio of UK regional data centres with a deep enterprise customer base” comments Eric Troyer, Chief Marketing Officer at Megaport. “The partnership helps to expand our UK network further to address the growing demand for cloud connectivity in-region. We are excited to support Pulsant’s mission to provide enhanced cloud connectivity in the North of the UK by helping companies to increase their speed to market and ability to scale.”

For more information, please visit the Cloud Connect webpage.

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If you’re reading this article, then you might be tasked with finding out how hybrid cloud fits in with your company’s current architecture. Or perhaps you’re just curious about how this cloud computing approach works.

Either way, here you’ll find lots of useful information about what hybrid cloud is, the advantages are of using it, and what options are available for your business.

Contents section

• What is hybrid cloud?
• How do hybrid clouds work?
  • Private cloud
  • Public cloud
  • Hybrid cloud
• Advantages of hybrid cloud
• Limitations
• Who is hybrid cloud suitable for?
• Hybrid cloud implementation
• Our hybrid cloud solutions

What is hybrid cloud?

The term ‘hybrid’ is used in everyday vernacular and refers to things that have been combined to make something new. In the case of the cloud, ‘hybrid’ means a mix of different ‘types’ or environments.

In essence, it’s an architecture that connects a company’s on-premises private cloud services to a third-party public cloud. Thereby creating a single infrastructure from which an organisation can choose the optimal cloud for each application or workload.

For example, it could include on-premise private clouds, externally hosted private clouds and public cloud services. It may also be a mix of UK-based hosting services with global hyperscale public cloud services.

Many organisations choose a hybrid cloud architecture to deploy their applications and data across a range of cloud environments. There might be instances where an application can’t be put into a public cloud for commercial or data protection reasons, so it is deployed internally or in a private cloud environment.

How do hybrid clouds work?

There are three main forms of cloud computing: private, public and hybrid. To understand how hybrid cloud solutions work, we first need to look at the differences between public and private clouds.

Public cloud

The public cloud is defined as computing services offered by third-party providers over the public Internet.

In a public cloud model, a company is essentially renting a portion of its distributed data centre infrastructure. The third-party cloud provider delivers compute, network, storage, and application resources while maintaining management rights. Some of the largest service providers include AWS, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, IBM, and Oracle.

Public clouds deliver cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). One of the main benefits for businesses is that the provider bears all the operational costs associated with hosting an application or workload. This offers you significant cost savings and takes the burden away from your IT staff.

Private cloud

As you might have guessed, the private cloud involves deploying infrastructure on your premises, as opposed to someone else’s. This is also called an internal or corporate cloud.

The corporate cloud can be offered either over the internet or via a private internal network. In the case of the former, many organisations build private clouds on rented data centres located off-premises to keep costs down.

Housing a private cloud yourself requires you to pay for the upfront expense of maintaining the equipment. You will also need the appropriate in-house IT experts to manage the infrastructure.

One of the main benefits of having a private cloud is that it gives you complete control over the computing environment and data. This may be pertinent to a company dealing with sensitive data or having to abide by strict regulations.

How does hybrid cloud differ to public or private?

Hybrid cloud allows companies to scale computing resources by allowing data and applications to be shared between both public and private clouds.

One reason you might want to do this is to gain the flexibility of the public cloud for basic computer tasks, while keeping sensitive data or intellectual property behind a company firewall via a private network. It also allows businesses to free up resources and make cost savings by delivering less mission-critical applications via the public cloud.

If you’ve already invested a significant amount of money into on-premise hardware, you can still use software as a service (SaaS) public cloud products for functions like customer relationship management or enterprise resource planning.

Hybrid cloud allows users to get the best out of both worlds, depending on the needs of the business, regulations and the data that’s being hosted. It can be used in many ways. It’s a good staging area, a good platform for building confidence in the cloud, developing a transformation programme on and carrying it out.

In the same vein, it may be a deployment model that must be used, either for compliance, regulatory, risk, latency or data sovereignty issues. Regardless, the benefits will depend on your business objectives.

The pros and cons of hybrid cloud

One of the main advantages of hybrid solutions is known as cloud bursting. This means if an organisation reaches maximum resource capacity, the overflow traffic is directed to a public cloud. This seamless transition from the private cloud is particularly useful for businesses that experience variable demand, such as those in the retail sector.

Here are some more advantages of hybrid cloud:

• Flexible policy-driven deployment to distribute workloads across public and private environments based on security, performance and cost requirements.
• Scalability of public cloud is achieved without exposing sensitive IT workloads to the inherent security risks.
• High reliability as the services are distributed across multiple data centres both public and private.
• Improved security as sensitive IT workloads run on dedicated resources in private clouds while regular workloads are spread across inexpensive public cloud to trade-off for cost investments.

Limitations of hybrid cloud architecture:

• It can get expensive.
• Strong compatibility and integration are required between cloud infrastructure spanning different locations and categories. This is a limitation with public cloud deployments, for which organisations lack direct control over the infrastructure.
• Additional infrastructure complexity is introduced as organisations operate and manage an evolving mix of private and public clouds.

Who is hybrid cloud suitable for?

There are multiple reasons why an organisation may choose to operate a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

It might be that your business has run out of physical space in your data centre. Or you are hosting a consumer website with the application databases placed on a private network. The opportunities for hybrid cloud solutions are gigantic and will depend on your business objectives.

Here are a few examples of situations where it can be useful:

• Organisations serving multiple verticals facing different IT security, regulatory and performance requirements.
• Optimising cloud investments without compromising on the value proposition of either public or private cloud technologies.
• Improving security in an existing cloud environment, such as SaaS offerings that must be delivered via secure private networks.
• Organisations that are still on their ‘cloud journey’. A hybrid cloud environment enables you to leverage the flexibility, scalability and the potential cost savings of the cloud without having to commit to moving all workloads to the cloud in one go.

Hybrid cloud implementation

How your cloud infrastructure is implemented will partly depend on the size of your organisation and business objectives. But there are a few considerations you should keep in mind, including:

• Defining the right application and data deployment model.
• Working in tandem with your enterprise systems.
• Assessing connectivity requirements.
• Assessing existing compliance frameworks and highlight gaps.
• Implementing security and privacy measures.
• Managing the cloud environment.
• Creating a backup and data recovery plan.

Our hybrid cloud solutions

As a hosting provider, we can offer you hybrid cloud solutions. We will bring all your different cloud environments together and manage them centrally. This gives you the ability to move data and apps between environments easily.

We will ensure everything ‘speaks to each other’ and that workloads can be moved from one cloud to another.

There are multiple ways of beginning your transition; the first (and perhaps most important) is understanding your organisation’s current state and defining your cloud aspirations. This can be done in several ways, including conducting a cloud readiness assessment, which determines your organisation’s current state and what’s needed to start your journey.

At Pulsant, we assess and baseline our customers against what we call a Cloud Maturity Matrix. The matrix acts as a guide to determine which cloud services are best suited to your business, by looking at how far along the migration journey you are. This includes looking at the various cloud services you’re already using, where you aspire to be, and then helps you plot a path forward, essentially helping you manage the process.

To find out more about our hybrid cloud services, contact our team today and we’ll be happy to find a solution that fits your business.

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There are plenty of cloud IT providers out there for consideration, but Pulsant is proud to be the UK’s leading secure hybrid IT provider.

With decades of experience in the industry, Pulsant designs, deploys and manages intelligent hybrid cloud platforms that enable growth, spur innovation and support success — all while helping businesses remain secure and compliant.

We’ve created a new corporate brochure to help enlighten readers around what makes Pulsant unique. It explains:

• Our approach to designing and delivering hybrid cloud platforms
• The various services/solutions that our expert team can deliver to customers
• The technologies that allow us to fulfil customers’ business needs

To find out more about who we are and what we do, be sure to download our corporate brochure.

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With just months to go before the UK leaves the European Union (EU), there is still widespread uncertainty about what to expect. But the fact remains there’s uncertainty around every corner, more so in different regions in the UK, such as the North East.

With data playing such a key role in our own business here at Pulsant, we’ve been paying attention to this developing topic over the last 18 months — looking specifically at data transfer across borders, data sovereignty and privacy.

Our whitepaper, ‘Preparing for Brexit’, explores the current landscape; providing ideas for questions you should ask yourself, especially when it comes to data and IT. Specifically it discusses:

• The effect of Brexit in the North East of England
• The data challenge in a post-Brexit world, including data adequacy
• Potential solutions to address changing times

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