Ponemon Institute© Research Report, Challenges & Trends in Public Sector IT Operations: United States. DevOps fuels optimism despite declining confidence, July 2017
“Public sector organizations are feeling the pains of digital transformation. Faced with modernization, data center upgrades and continuous cloud-first initiatives, this transformation of the IT environment is making it a challenge to deliver services, comply with service level agreements (SLAs), meet citizens’ expectations and achieve organizational missions. The evidence is clear from a research study conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Splunk of 1,227 decision makers and operations staff across federal, state and local governments, higher education and federal systems integrators and aerospace and defense industries. Challenges & Trends in Public Sector IT Operations: the United States reveals that digital transformation is well underway with budgets shifting from traditional on premise investments to more cloud and agile development paradigms. This shift in the IT environment, while being embraced,has led to an overall loss of confidence among public sector organizations. This sentiment is shared across all segments of the public sector and is evidenced in respondents’ lack of confidence in their organizations’ ability to accomplish the following:

• Ensure performance and availability of systems to meet SLAs consistently
• Handle the scale and complexity of IT operations
• Ensure efficiency of operations
• Migrate workloads to the cloud
• Manage data center upgrades

Research findings explain the reasons for the loss of confidence. These include siloed IT systems and technologies and an in ability to integrate those systems, according to 72 percent of respondents. Respondents also cite the lack of end-to-end visibility (73 percent of respondents) and complexity and diversity of technologies and systems (66 percent of respondents) among the biggest challenges to service delivery along with a dearth of skills, expertise and resources to effectively accomplish their jobs…”