An independent global survey has revealed 77 per cent of retail CIOs are concerned that increasing IT complexity could soon make digital-performance management impossible.
The research, which was released by Dynatrace, showed that rapid adoption of new technologies is creating a major headache for retailers’ IT teams, which now spend an average of 30 per cent of their time dealing with digital-performance issues. This translates to an average cost of $1.8 million per business each year.
The survey also revealed that 53 per cent of retail CIOs are planning to deploy new technologies in the next 12 months with heavy focus on multi-cloud (98 per cent), microservices (89 per cent) and containers (86 per cent).
Another key finding of the 219 retail CIOs showed that complexity is growing rapidly, as a single web or mobile retail transaction now crosses an average of 34 different technology systems or components, compared with 20 just five years ago.
A large portion (75 per cent) of CIOs say multi-cloud makes it especially difficult and time consuming to monitor and understand the impact cloud services have on the user experience, while 74 per cent say monitoring performance of microservices in real time is almost impossible.
An even greater number (85 per cent) of CIOs said the dynamic nature of containers make it difficult to understand their impact on application performance, and 81 per cent said artificial intelligence will be critical to mastering the increasing complexity of IT functions.