IT asset, infrastructure visibility a work in progress, says Flexera report

Less than 25% of organizations have complete visibility into IT assets as enterprises wrestle with data quality and tracking across on premises and cloud infrastructure, according to a Flexera survey.

Flexera's State of IT Visibility Report puts the spotlight on IT data visibility and the moving parts of tracking infrastructure, asset management and vulnerabilities. The topic is also notable given so many enterprise vendors ranging from BMC to SolarWinds to ServiceNow to Atlassian are players in the space.

This tracking issue also has an impact on security. Companies can't secure infrastructure they can't see.

A few of the high-level stats from Flexera's survey of more than 300 global technology leaders.

• 81% say lack of good data is the top challenge for IT decision making.
• 24% of organizations have complete visibility with 70.8% saying they have some visibility and 4% none at all.
• 73.9% of respondents said they have the greatest visibility into on-premises hardware followed by on-premises software at 68.3%, cloud instances at 45.9% and SaaS at 40.9%.

• More than 25% of hardware and software is end of life or end of support.
• Vulnerabilities were cited by 49% of respondents as their greatest concern about IT assets. Software sprawl was the top concern for 22.5%.
• 58.8% of vulnerabilities in end of life and end of support software had low threat severity.
• Operating systems are the most vulnerable category for end of life and end of support, according to 45.6% of respondents.
• 46.5% of respondents actively patch fewer than 50% of applications.