IT budgets have held up quite well despite the pandemic, and the majority of respondents (63%) were actually accelerating or maintaining their digital transformation initiatives, according to an OpsRamp study of 230 IT operations executives in the US and UK in October 2020.

The same IT ops pros said they were focused on buying tools that enabled compelling customer and employee experiences.

The current OpsRamp study, which was conducted in March 2021 and includes input from 132 IT operations directors or above in the UK, tells a similar story. Respondents to this year's survey are still moving forward with digital transformation, but many are re-evaluating the number and type of tools they're using.

There are three main takeaways from the 2021 survey:

Trend 1: Too Many Tools

Only 27% of respondents are highly satisfied with their current monitoring approaches. 52% are moderately satisfied and 21% are somewhat dissatisfied or not at all satisfied.

Areas of improvement for existing tools include the ability to monitor hybrid, multi-cloud and cloud-native infrastructure, integrate data and automate incident response for efficient and timely operations, and support business goals with accurate and relevant insights.

Meanwhile, nearly all IT ops pros (95%) surveyed this year said they're using at least five tools every day and half are using more than 10.

Apparently, though, that's about to change, with 37% saying they expect to cut the number of tools they use this year by half.

Trend 2: AIOps is Here to Stay

AIOps has become a focal point for this "tool rationalization," as the technology appears to have sufficiently demonstrated its ability to act as a sort of connective tissue for centralized operations by delivering proactive insights across different IT monitoring, service management and process automation tools.

The results of the 2021 study back this up, with 48% of respondents saying they have prioritized AIOps across their enterprise IT environments.

The 2021 study also found that 42% of IT ops pros have already deployed AIOps in their organization, and 55% plan to roll out AIOps this year.

Trend 3: Requirements for a Modern IT Ops Solution

Given the strong recent media attention on hacks and data vulnerabilities, it's not surprising that the 2021 study found that platform security, which is the ability to withstand sophisticated attacks, is the most critical attribute of a modern IT ops solution (61%).

The next two capabilities ranked important by IT ops pros were hybrid infrastructure management (53%) for controlling the chaos of distributed architectures, and SaaS and multi-tenant architecture (46%) that allow IT to manage hybrid infrastructure from the cloud, without introducing additional system overhead.

IT ops leaders also see huge value in deploying a digital operations management platform that offers capabilities for hybrid, multi-cloud and cloud-native monitoring, intelligent incident management and automated remediation.

56% of respondents expect to roll out a digital operations management platform this year.

"This study exposes new priorities for IT ops pros and validates many of our hypotheses on the future of IT operations," said George Bonser, VP of EMEA Sales for OpsRamp. "The pandemic accelerated many of the mid-flight digital transformation initiatives. Tools are a valuable part of the IT operations portfolio, but the future belongs to digital operations management platforms that can consolidate data across hybrid environments, apply machine learning to drive faster incident analysis, and use process automation to handle repetitive work."