IT Infrastructure Is Getting Complex—Here’s How to Fix It

Today’s digital-first world with exploding IT infrastructure growth is further driven by the proliferation of cloud computing, IoT devices, virtualization technology, IoT devices, AI, GenAI, and Big Data analytics among others.  These factors, along with the need for data security, remote work solutions, and service assurance, are not only contributing to the growth of the IT infrastructure but also adding to its complexity.  According to Mordor Intelligence, the IT infrastructure market, which is estimated at USD 230.11 billion in 2025, is expected to reach USD 433.3 billion by 2030.  The emerging technologies and evolving customer demand are driving a robust IT infrastructure, fueling further business expansion.  On the other hand, the same fast-growing IT ecosystem can give rise to infrastructure or tool sprawl, resulting in the original operational parameters shifting away from alignment.

In any IT infrastructure, the deployment of one project sets the stage for several others to follow.  Every new application, site, or service drives the demand for specialised expertise, additional time, and budget allocation to ensure it is well-managed and secured.  With more tools getting added to the IT infrastructure regularly, especially those with overlapping capabilities, ITOps teams are often times overwhelmed and face challenges with performance tracking and dependency mapping in this fragmented ecosystem, where there is limited visibility.

Simpson’s Paradox - Performance Dashboards Can Mislead

Centralized dashboards located at the main data centers may indicate green where systems are shown in good operating conditions, but these high-level views can be misleading, with the localized issues getting overlooked.  Such errors not only delay mean time to knowledge (MTTK) but also give ITOps teams a distorted picture of the overall system health.  Although monitoring strategies are evolving, the IT infrastructure is scaling even more rapidly, compelling ITOps teams to utilize and rely upon centralized dashboards that present simplified metrics built on incomplete datasets, creating blind spots in performance visibility.

This risk is illustrated in the Simpson’s Paradox, which is a statistical phenomenon where trends seen in aggregate data reverse or vanish when observed in segments.  Here, system health that may appear normal at a high level can present serious issues when broken down by location, user interaction, or time frame.  While ITOps teams analyze outputs such as logs and performance metrics, they often lack the granularity required to detect hidden issues.  This challenge can be addressed only with real-time packet-level visibility.  For instance, a financial services company’s branch office may appear to have normal bandwidth usage, yet recurring microbursts disrupt performance during trading hours.  In another case, the VPN slowness at an insurance contact center goes undetected on dashboards, while two overloaded load balancers intermittently time out.  In the absence of contextual visibility, such service degradations can go unnoticed and critical events unprioritized, increasing operational risk.

Designed for Growth, Not Seamless Integration

Remote sites very frequently present serious challenges with the expansion of the network edge, complex distributed systems, network latency, and limited visibility.  Unfortunately, these locations, even while supporting mission-critical functions like customer service interactions, onsite activities, and transaction processing, are often overlooked in the digital transformation journey of the organization.  Until there is a disruption in the remote workflow or a complaint is raised, the centralized ITOps teams are unable to detect any issues.  As tech stacks at organizations shift toward AI, automation, and cloud native technologies, data volumes and system interconnectivity are expanding too on a parallel path, contributing to the complexity.  It is then a challenge for organizations to ensure a consistent user experience while reaching their business goals.  Furthermore, with smart technologies getting implemented, expectations also rise with everyone anticipating all aspects to be ‘smart’ which is not so in reality.  Several issues remain hidden with the details often missed by traditional metrics and become visible only in packet-level data captured in real-time at the site, service, and session levels.

Tool Sprawl and Performance

ITOps teams are under constant pressure to work at a faster pace and deliver quick results.  To address this challenge at a faster rate, these teams accumulate monitoring tools along with humungous volumes of data.  Research indicates 36.6% of organizations are using 11 or more tools to manage IT environments.  ITOps teams find it rather difficult to manage the tool and data sprawl, as it takes more time, effort, and resources in the attempt to overcome these challenges.

Packets Don’t Lie

Taming of the sprawl can be accomplished by ITOps teams with the integration of packet-level intelligence, more importantly, in edge locations where metrics, logs, and traces are not adequate.  Packet-level intelligence can offer enhanced observability across cloud, data center, and remote infrastructure.  This capability can help ITOps teams take back the control of complex, distributed environments while ensuring digital transformation efforts do not result in greater operational sprawl.  As the pressure on CIO’s continues to mount to simultaneously (and constantly), mitigate risk and innovate while managing IT infrastructure assets, packet-level intelligence is critical for success.

-By Gaurav Mohan, VP Sales, SAARC & Middle East, NETSCOUT

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect CyberMedia’s stance.)