More than 9 in 10 IT professional describe themselves as operationally resilient, meaning they can anticipate and handle risks to the business and maintain efficient workflow. Yet these same professionals say that operational resilience faces big challenges in a workplace disrupted by forces ranging from AI to constant cyberattacks.

These findings are from a new IT trends report, Fragile to Agile: The State of Operational Resilience. Released by IT infrastructure software vendor SolarWinds, the report surveyed 600 IT leaders across multiple countries to determine how companies struggle to maintain operational resilience.

The results revealed IT teams struggling with a remarkable array of distractions and disruptions. Fewer than half of IT professionals feel confident handling bring-your-own-device policies (26%), managing increasing user expectations (36%), artificial intelligence (38%), and remote and distributed workforces (45%). A mere 52% feel confident managing cyberthreats, a statistic that should strike fear into enterprise executives across sectors.

“Companies often default to solving problems with technology first,” said RJ Gazarek, senior director of product marketing at SolarWinds. However, “while they may buy the best-in-class tools to solve all their problems, they tend to forget about how people leverage the tools. They buy seats but forget the people sitting in them.”

Fixes to IT issues won’t work without a large, all-encompassing game plan that balances the staff and how they use technology, he noted.

This lack of a holistic plan means that many IT pros work in environments where operational resiliency is hampered by mismanagement. Some 53% of respondents say inefficient workflows slow issue response, and 36% point to understaffing as a key challenge—a perennial complaint of IT teams, which are typically pared to the bone. Only a relatively small 13% say they lack the right tools, a reflection of the elaborately tooled setup of many IT divisions.

Similarly, many companies fail to adequately monitor crucial management metrics like MTTx (mean time to detect, acknowledge, or resolve). Even among companies that do monitor these performance metrics, there are still frequent issues, like team structure (44%), workflow (67%), and tooling (73%).

The larger problem created by this mismanagement, and the corresponding lack of operational resilience, is that it impacts customers. A full 71% of respondents note customer experience as a core concern stemming from system issues. Most significant, 32% said their company lost revenue from outages and critical issues. Brand damage is a problem in the view of 28%, which long term could result in loss of revenue.

“In today’s competitive environment, operational resilience is no longer a nice-to-have but rather a strategic imperative,” said Cullen Childress, chief product officer at SolarWinds. Accomplishing this elusive goal, he said, requires the optimal mix of workflow, top talent and tools. Ideally, this mix can turn IT from a costly expense to “a true driver of competitive advantage.”

Arguably the most valuable segment of the report was the short answers that survey respondents provided to detail ways they’re personally working to build resilience. Comments included:

• “Advocating for necessary changes that rely less on manual processing and more on technology assistance, as this allows more staff to be available for other causes.”
• “Defining process as precisely as possible. Clearly define and procure technologies to respond to it effectively.”
• “Improving our understanding of the processes and how teams can support each application, and using new tools to automate some of the workflow.”