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With entire teams working from home for an indefinite time, IT leaders feel more pressure than ever to automate manual processes and improve remote collaboration skills.

Virtana’s new report, “The Current State of Hybrid Cloud and IT,” found that IT leaders are spending more time and resources managing their systems and infrastructure. That is taking time away from big picture projects like cloud migration and automation.

Seventy-seven percent of IT infrastructure leaders said artificial intelligence for IT operations would be a key to triaging problems in the future.

The study found that the top infrastructure impacts of COVID-19 have been:

  • Increased time spent working across multiple systems – 56% of respondents
  • Increased need to over-provision infrastructures to meet performance – 55%
  • Lack of access to the correct tools to run efficiently – 53%
  • Increased IT infrastructure performance issues – 53%

The report authors found that the problem may be that existing tools are not configured properly for remote work:

“Teams who’ve worked in the same physical location and are used to being able to simply shout out questions to their peers may simply be suffering from the absence of that collaboration. The answer may be to better configure and increase automation across tool sets. Mitigating the tools issue could also go a long way toward resolving the support services challenge.”

Fewer than 30% of respondents have halted cloud migration plans as a result of COVID-19. Respondents who did halt cloud migration were twice as likely to over-provision to ensure performance as compared to companies that did not stop the transition.

SEE: Hybrid cloud: A guide for IT pros (free PDF)

Also, respondents who halted their cloud migration were also more likely to experience system outages that hurt key performance indicators than IT teams who are continuing their cloud migration.

Twenty-one percent of respondents who continued a cloud migration say the recent economic climate contributed to missed KPIs in IT performance compared to 58% of those who did not continue their migration.

Even among companies that kept cloud migration projects on track, working across multiple systems to create a single report on IT resources was the top concern since the transition to remote work.

Buying excess cloud capacity is not solving outage problems and is becoming a costly problem for enterprise teams that have stopped cloud migration projects, according to the report.

In May, Virtana surveyed 116 IT infrastructure professionals in the US, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to gauge the state of digital infrastructure.