The UK’s fragmented IT landscape could be holding businesses back

For businesses, the idea of not having all your eggs in one basket can be a good practice in theory. It has benefits such as avoiding vendor lock-in, whereby an organisation is forced to continue using a product or service because switching to another vendor is not practical or without substantial switching costs.

However, this diversification, driven partly by the rise in point solutions, has led to 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 mid-market companies between 501 and 2,500 employees have 255 apps on average. For large enterprises this figure more than doubles to an average of 664 apps.

In turn, this has created a fragmented landscape across the UK’s IT sector, with organisations employing the services of multiple vendors at once, something which ultimately could be holding businesses back.

Many vendors but no accountability

This fragmented landscape has led to organisations calling upon a range of different vendors for each different need they have - whether that’s storage, back-ups, data centres, virtual desktops, cybersecurity, you name it. Sometimes enterprises will even have multiple vendors for the same solution, such as having their data stored with multiple providers or employing a range of different back-up solution providers.

While this does stop businesses being reliant on one vendor for potentially critical solutions, it means when things go wrong there is typically no accountability, which is one of the biggest challenges enterprises and their IT teams face.

Vendors will often point the finger at each other and say “not our problem”, and sometimes they won’t even provide access to troubleshoot the issue. This can pose a significant problem for chief technology officers (CTOs) and their teams in trying to navigate their tech stack and pinpoint where the issues are coming from. With no real accountability when outages occur, this can lead to a lack of visibility and make diagnosing the problem all the more difficult.

For CTOs and their teams, it’s a challenge that’s often accentuated by pressure from above, with business leaders demanding IT issues be resolved quickly to avoid any damaging consequences.

Downtime costs businesses billions

This pressure comes because ultimately, IT issues can be very costly for businesses. A lack of accountability when IT problems arise, with different vendors unwilling to accept an issue may lie with them and IT teams struggling to pinpoint the root cause, often leads to more frequent IT outages. This in turn results in a significant amount of downtime, which can see

operations grind to a halt in some cases and cost businesses precious time, and vitally, money.

For example, recent research by Splunk and Oxford Economics showed that unplanned downtime is costing top businesses globally around $400 billion annually, equivalent to 9% of their total profits. While in the UK specifically, research showed that internet downtime cost businesses more than £3.7 billion last year, with businesses increasingly reliant on constant internet connectivity to maintain operations. In fact, some businesses can be so dependent on connectivity for communication, commerce and access to cloud applications that they face the risk of losing money the moment their connection drops.

Such downtime has a direct impact on a business’s bottom line in terms of lost revenue, but it can also have other effects which could hold back their growth. This includes stagnant developer productivity, delayed time-to-market for products or services, and even a negative impact on their brand value and reputation if the customer experience is ultimately affected.

A single point of contact is key

Having a single point of contact responsible for managing their IT can help organisations overcome these challenges.

Either hiring an external provider accountable for the whole IT environment, or allocating this responsibility to a team internally if they have the capacity, would allow organisations to gain complete control over their technology stack. This is something that a significant number of businesses lack, with multiple vendors and point solutions working in silos and not always willing to provide access in the event of an outage or other issue, or accept a problem may lie with their solution.

This single point of contact, taking overall responsibility, would be able to come in and take a top-down view over all segments of the organisation’s IT set-up, from the network to the routers, enabling them to gain complete visibility on everything. This would then allow them to pinpoint exactly where an issue lies, and have the access needed to enable them to fix it properly.

In turn this would lead to far fewer outages and costly downtime, allowing enterprises to set up their IT infrastructure as a driver for business success and the platform for future growth.