UK’s fragmented IT landscape could be holding businesses back
For businesses, the idea of not putting all your eggs in one basket can be a good practice in theory. It has benefits such as avoiding vendor lock-in, where an organization is forced to continue using a product or service because switching to another vendor is not practical or without significant switching costs.
However, this diversification, driven in part by the rise of point solutions, has created a plethora of options for enterprises when it comes to choosing vendors for their specific IT needs. Studies show that the average small business with 500 or fewer employees has 172 software applications, while midsize businesses with 501 to 2,500 employees have an average of 255 apps. For large enterprises, this number more than doubles to an average of 664 apps.
This has led to a fragmented landscape in the UK IT sector, with organisations using services from multiple vendors simultaneously, which can ultimately become a barrier to business.
Chief Technology Officer at Intelliworx.
Many suppliers, but no accountability
This fragmented landscape has led to organizations turning to a range of different vendors for every need they have – whether that’s cloud storage, backup, data centers, virtual desktops, cybersecurity, you name it. Sometimes, enterprises even have multiple vendors for the same solution, such as storing their data with multiple providers or using a range of different backup solution providers.
While this removes the dependency on a single vendor for potentially critical solutions, it does mean that there is typically no accountability when things go wrong. And that is one of the biggest challenges facing businesses and their IT teams.
Vendors often point fingers at each other and say “not our problem,” and sometimes they don’t even provide access to fix the problem. This can pose a significant problem for Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) and their teams as they try to navigate their tech stack and figure out where the issues are coming from. Without real accountability when outages occur, this can lead to a lack of visibility and make diagnosing the problem even more difficult.
For CTOs and their teams, it’s a challenge often compounded by pressure from above, with business leaders demanding that IT issues be resolved quickly to avoid damaging consequences.
Downtime costs companies billions
This pressure arises because IT issues can ultimately be very costly to businesses. A lack of accountability when IT issues arise, with various vendors unwilling to accept a problem, can fall on them and IT teams struggle to identify the root cause, often leading to more frequent IT outages. This in turn results in a significant amount of downtime, which in some cases can bring operations to a standstill and cost businesses valuable time and, most importantly, money.
For example, recent research from Splunk and Oxford Economics found that unplanned downtime costs top companies globally around $400 billion annually, equivalent to 9% of their total profits. In the UK specifically, research showed that internet downtime cost businesses over £3.7 billion last year, with businesses increasingly reliant on constant internet connectivity to maintain their operations. Some businesses may be so reliant on connectivity for communication, commerce and access to cloud applications that they risk losing money if their connection goes down.
Such downtime has a direct impact on a company’s bottom line in terms of lost revenue, but it can also have other effects that can hinder their growth. This includes stagnating developer productivity, delayed time to market for products or services, and even a negative impact on their brand equity and reputation if the customer experience is ultimately affected.
Organizations can address these challenges by creating a single point of contact responsible for managing their IT.
Organizations can gain full control over their technology stack by hiring an external provider to take responsibility for the entire IT environment, or by assigning this responsibility internally if they have the capacity. This is something that a significant number of companies lack, with multiple vendors and point solutions operating in silos and not always willing to provide access in the event of an outage or other problem, or accept that a problem may lie with their solution.
This single point of contact, who has overall responsibility, would be able to come in and take a top-down view of all segments of the organization’s IT setup, from the network to the routers, giving them complete visibility into everything. This would then allow them to pinpoint exactly where a problem lies, and have the access they need to fix it appropriately.
This in turn would lead to far fewer outages and costly downtime, allowing companies to leverage their IT infrastructure as an engine for business success and a platform for future growth.
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