Research from Ponemon Institute highlights lack of confidence in public sector IT

Public sector IT decision-makers are not confident about their ability to quickly restore services following an IT failure, according to study from the Ponemon Institute on behalf of software supplier Splunk.

The survey of nearly 1,250 global public sector IT decision-makers and managers revealed that public sector organisations undergoing digital transformation are losing confidence in IT operations’ ability to manage the influx of new technologies and evolving citizen and mission expectations.

The Ponemon survey found that, on average, it takes 41 hours and 11 staff members to restore the IT systems to operational status following an outage, costing an average of £21,846.

A third of IT decision makers (41%) said better network visibility would be the most effective way to strengthen IT operations, while 7% said a lack of end-to-end visibility is the biggest hurdle to effective service delivery.

More than 60% said skills and resourcing skills and resources are major problems in their organisations.

Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, said: “The confidence gap we are seeing maps to other industry and government technology trends, including growing public scrutiny, ever-present resource limitations and rapidly increasing expectations of technology by users.

“There’s never been a more important time for public sector organisations to embrace analytics to help them face and overcome these challenges with data.”

Despite a current lack of confidence, public sector IT operators see an optimistic future for increased adoption of DevOps, with roughly half of respondents anticipating increased spending devoted to it (46%) over the next 12 months.

Additionally, respondents were encouraged by new network visibility and machine learning technologies and capabilities, saying they could have a major impact on improving and strengthening IT operations in the future.

More than half of the IT decision makers in the UK public sector who took part in the survey said they still receive too many alerts (57%) and that those alerts generate too many false positives (56%).

Some 80% of respondents are unsure or do not think that their current crop of analytics and monitoring tools are helping them pinpoint problems and determine root causes since they lack end-to-end visibility.

Kevin Davis, vice-president of public sector at Splunk, said: “A majority of IT decision makers do not think or are unsure if challenges such as IT troubleshooting, service monitoring, security and business and mission analytics can be addressed using a single set of data.”