Dive Brief:

• A new report says 76% of chief information officers surveyed think growing information technology complexity may soon make it impossible to efficiently manage digital performance. The global survey of 800 chief information officers is from Dynatrace, a digital performance management company, according to a press release.

• IT complexity is growing exponentially, the study said. For example, a single web or mobile transaction now crosses an average of 35 different technology systems or components, compared to 22 just five years ago.

• The rapid adoption of new technologies has driven this trend to where it is now and it will likely accelerate in the next 12 months, when 53% of CIOs plan to deploy even more technologies. As a result of this complexity, IT teams now spend an average of 29% of their time dealing with digital performance problems.

Dive Insight:

Remember when big data was a big deal?

Coming challenges like multi-cloud architecture and hyper-complex IT ecosystems challenge an organization's ability to progress beyond physical databases and third-party cloud service providers. The philosophy of "More technology is better" has reached a tipping point.

"Today's organizations are under huge pressure to keep up with the always-on, always-connected digital economy and its demand for constant innovation," Matthias Scharer, vice president of business operations at Dynatrace, said in a statement. "As a consequence, IT ecosystems are undergoing a constant transformation. The transition to virtualized infrastructure was followed by the migration to the cloud, which has since been supplanted by the trend towards multi-cloud."

CIOs have realized that legacy apps weren't built for today's digital ecosystems and are rebuilding them in a cloud-native architecture. "These rapid changes have given rise to hyper-scale, hyper-dynamic and hyper-complex IT ecosystems, which makes it extremely difficult to monitor performance and find and fix problems fast," Scharer explained in the press release.

Among the other survey findings: 76% of CIOs said multi-cloud makes it especially difficult and time-consuming to monitor and understand the impact that cloud services have on the user-experience; 72% are frustrated that IT has to spend so much time setting up monitoring for different cloud environments when deploying new services; and 72% said monitoring the performance of micro-services in real-time is almost impossible.

"For cloud to deliver on expected benefits, organizations must have end-to-end visibility across every single transaction," Scharer said in a statement. "However, this has become very difficult because organizations are building multi-cloud ecosystems on a variety of services."

The study also reported that IT departments are struggling to keep pace with internal demands from the business, with 74% of CIOs saying that IT is under too much pressure to keep up with unrealistic demands from the business and end users. Over three-quarters (78%) said it is getting harder to find the time and resources to answer the range of questions businesses ask, while 80% of CIOs said it is difficult to map the technical metrics of digital performance to the impact they have on the business.