Nearly half of survey respondents are plagued by regular IT performance and availability issues, according to IT Growth and Transformation, a survey of UK CIOs and IT leaders conducted by Vanson Bourne, commissioned by ControlCircle.

- 48% of respondents experience hourly, daily and weekly availability and outage issues

- 21% of those asked experience business downtime daily or hourly

Overall, smaller organizations (employing between 251-500 employees) report a higher level of service excellence across the board. Even in this group, only 46% claim excellence in quality of service, regardless of budget. Among larger enterprises, only 20% of respondents believed they were achieving best effort in quality of service, regardless of cost control.

When questioned about IT environment complexity opinions are split. 40% of respondents agree that their current environments are more complex compared to five years ago, with hybrid IT cited as the most difficult and complex to manage by 55%.

Looking forward five years, approximately half believe their current IT environment will simplify; yet, 30% still believe complexity will increase. 52% of respondents do not have the ability to support the hybrid IT environment within a single IT governance framework.

This complexity is exacerbated by the proliferation of monitoring tools. Respondents revealed that on average, IT departments are using at least 13 monitoring tools to manage discrete applications in their IT estate. The number of tools was reported as high as 17 in large organizations.

The cloud is seen as a current and increasing challenge for IT departments, with the use of private cloud services more common than not. This leads to a large proportion of organizations having hybrid IT environments that make use of managed service providers (MSPs). Across the board approximately 50% of all respondents have part of their IT infrastructure as a managed service. When it comes to choosing a MSP almost two thirds of respondents report that 24/7 service is crucial, alongside flexibility (55%) and cost effectiveness (54%).

"Use of private cloud services are more common than not in today's enterprise, with most IT organizations using a mix of IT services," comments Carmen Carey, MD at ControlCircle. "This leads to a large proportion of organizations having a hybrid IT environment, which they cannot keep control of, making 24/7 service and flexibility the top ‘must haves' within third party services partners. These issues are made worse by a complexity in tools adopted to monitor the environment, leaving CIOs struggling for real time visibility and a sense that they are in control. What is interesting is that over half of respondents agreed, or strongly agreed, that hybrid IT is difficult and complex to manage. With the increase in cloud adaption, MSPs are a sure way organizations can get the expertise they need to future proof their business."

The three biggest challenges IT departments are currently facing are security, cloud and compliance (65%, 36% and 34% respectively). In the next five years mobility of workforce is going to become of increasing importance, with IT leaders predicting that security (56%), cloud (46%) and mobility (41%) are to become the biggest challenges IT departments face.

The prevalence of big data is also predicted to rise in the next five years. It makes the biggest jump in ranking (originally seventh on the list of nine, rising to fourth) with an 8% increase from 30% to 38%.

About the Survey: The research was conducted with 250 senior IT decision-makers working in UK organizations that employ third party and managed service providers and a minimum of 250 staff. The IT leaders interviewed were taken from the manufacturing, technology, financial services, professional services, healthcare, telecoms and utilities industries.