Research reveals the shift to multicloud environments has broken retailers’ traditional approaches to infrastructure monitoring

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Research reveals the shift to multicloud environments has broken retailers’ traditional approaches to infrastructure monitoring.

Dynatrace has announced the findings of an independent global survey of 130 CIOs and senior IT practitioners responsible for driving innovation in the retail sector. 

The research revealed retailers are struggling to keep up with the complexity across modern multicloud environments that support omnichannel customer experiences and critical business applications. These environments are critical to create the agility needed to accelerate the delivery of high-quality digital services that enable retailers to create new, innovative shopping experiences.

However, retail IT departments are drowning in data and spending hours on manual, routine tasks to monitor their cloud environments, eating into time that could be spent driving innovation and creating value for the business.

Key findings of the research reveal:

• Drive for faster retail innovation. 99% of retailers have adopted a multicloud environment to keep up with the accelerating pace of digital transformation.
• Growing IT complexity. On average, retailers rely on 6 different solutions to monitor their multicloud infrastructure.
• Difficulty monitoring infrastructure puts customer experience at risk. 64% of retailers say the multitude of tools makes it difficult to optimise the performance of their infrastructure.
• Lack of visibility impacts revenue. 91% of retailers say they need better visibility and understanding into the impact investments in IT infrastructure have on revenue growth.
• Blind spots hinder retail innovation. 60% of retailers say visibility blind spots in their multicloud environments pose a risk to digital transformation, as IT teams find themselves without an easy way to monitor their infrastructure end-to-end. 

“Today’s consumers expect retailers to deliver a constant stream of new digital services that create more frictionless and immersive shopping experiences,” said Greg Adams, Regional Vice President, UK & Ireland at Dynatrace. “There is more pressure than ever to stay ahead of emerging trends and fend off competitors in a notoriously fast-paced industry. Multicloud architectures have been key in enabling retailers to keep up with these demands, by providing the agility they need to innovate faster. However, teams are struggling to manage the complexity these multicloud environments bring, which is taking up time that could be better spent driving digital transformation and finding new ways to meet the evolving needs of their customers.” 

Additional findings include:

• Manual approaches are no longer enough. 63% of retailers say traditional infrastructure monitoring solutions are no longer fit for purpose in a multicloud world.
• Monitoring IT drains retailers’ resources. 60% of retailers say infrastructure management is a growing drain on IT resources, as teams are forced to switch between different solutions and dashboards to gain insights.
• Manual, routine tasks slow retail innovation. Nearly half (42%) of retail innovators’ time is wasted on manual, routine work to “keep the lights on” across their environments, creating a major productivity drain and missed revenue opportunities due to innovation delays.
• A unified platform is at the heart of retail success. More than half (63%) of retailers believe traditional infrastructure monitoring approaches must be replaced with a platform that can provide end-to-end visibility across multicloud environments. 

“Retail IT teams are drowning in data as they try to tame complexity across their dynamic multicloud environments,” continued Adams. “Those teams still using traditional monitoring approaches are forced to spend significant time manually extracting the insights they need to keep IT infrastructure running effectively. Retailers need a more intelligent approach that can keep up with modern, multicloud environments. By combining end-to-end observability, AI, and automation, retailers will be able to free up teams’ time to refocus on accelerating the delivery of high-quality omnichannel journeys and optimising shopping experiences for their customers.”

The research is based on a global survey of 130 CIOs and senior IT practitioners involved in infrastructure management in retail organisations with more than 1,000 employees, conducted by Coleman Parkes and commissioned by Dynatrace.