Operational resilience is hailed as a defining trait for modern enterprises, enabling them to adapt quickly and mitigate disruption. Yet, a new survey suggests that most IT professionals’ confidence in their resilience might not align with reality.

According to a new study by SolarWinds in partnership with UserEvidence, more than nine in 10 IT leaders and professionals consider their organisations to be resilient — a third describing themselves as “very resilient” and 55% as “moderately resilient.”

However, the survey’s findings reveal a more complicated picture, with data overload, fragmented workflows, and a shortage of skilled staff undermining true operational resilience.

Defining Operational Resilience

SolarWinds defines operational resilience as the ability to “identify, anticipate, and mitigate risks to help prevent future issues while also accelerating responses to disruptions when they do occur.” This involves a holistic understanding of how teams, workflows, and tools interact across an organisation.

While its importance is undisputed, achieving resilience is not straightforward.

Distributed workplaces, ongoing data migrations, and the relentless push for faster services with less downtime have created operational complexity that often backfires. AI, while promising greater automation and efficiency, is also raising the stakes for data management and observability (among a slew of other potential issues down the line).

“Organisations often adopt multiple monitoring tools to manage diverse environments,” the report notes. “This has led to tool and workload sprawl, siloed information, and disconnected data.”

The study emphasises full-stack observability – a single, unified view of hybrid environments spanning on-premises and cloud workloads – as critical for detecting incidents early and responding effectively.

Perception vs Reality

Although 90% of respondents rate their organisations as resilient, the data shows gaps in practice.

The report states that many IT teams are still reactive, scrambling to resolve service degradation or outages rather than preventing them.

Operational resilience also directly impacts IT staff: 68% of respondents say it affects their job satisfaction, security, and stability.

Those working in “very resilient” organisations report more positive outcomes, while the majority, who classify themselves as only “moderately resilient,” face a mix of benefits and frustrations.

The Core Challenge: Teams, Workflows, and Tools

The survey highlights a critical disconnect.

While 87% of IT leaders believe they have the right technology stack, operational resilience is rarely a technology-first issue. Tools are effective only when integrated with the right workflows and supported by skilled teams.

“People generally believe they have solved their tooling issues, yet they still experience pain,” the report states.

“While it might be due to using the wrong tool, it’s often because they overlook the importance of workflows and the teams those tools support. It creates real headaches for them.”

Measuring Resilience: The Role of MTTx

Mean Time to Detect, Acknowledge, or Resolve (MTTx) is a common benchmark for gauging IT performance and resilience. The report found that:

• 73% of respondents say tools have the greatest impact on reducing MTTx.

• 67% cite workflows as the second-largest factor.

• 44% rank teams as having the biggest influence.

Detection remains the most challenging stage, rated 2.5 times harder than resolution. When customer complaints become the first signal of an issue, it often reflects a lack of visibility within the IT environment.

Budgets, Inefficiencies, and Customer Impact

The survey shows that two-thirds of organisations spend between 11% and 30% of their IT budget addressing issues and service disruptions. However, this spending level doesn’t necessarily equate to resilience.

Respondents who spend more than half of their team’s time on issue resolution:

• Allocate more budget to disruptions, often signalling inefficiencies.

• Report greater negative impacts on job satisfaction and stability.

• Prefer alternative performance metrics over MTTx by nearly 2:1.

• Are 50% more likely to say they lack sufficient personnel to support resilience.

The consequences of weak resilience are stark:

• 71% cite customer experience as the biggest casualty of outages.

• 32% report lost revenue due to disruptions.

• 28% say outages damage their brand.

A latency increase of just 500 milliseconds can significantly reduce user activity, with direct financial repercussions.

Building Resilience: Teams, Workflows, and Tools

While most respondents believe they have the right tools, challenges with workflows are the most common barrier to operational resilience. Hiring additional staff is often seen as the default solution, but the survey suggests this approach can be costly and ineffective if underlying process inefficiencies remain.

Key steps IT professionals are taking include:

• Upskilling teams: Training employees to address diverse operational challenges.

• Automation: Prioritising automated solutions to handle repetitive tasks and free up resources for strategic initiatives.

• AI adoption: Only 38% of respondents feel they manage AI effectively, signalling a major opportunity to integrate AI-driven observability and incident response.

• Tool optimisation: While tools are rarely cited as the biggest hurdle, some organisations are exploring upgrades, developing custom solutions, or consolidating toolsets to reduce sprawl.

Commenting on these internal gaps between confidence and capability, Sascha Giese, tech evangelist at SolarWinds, said “This report confirms what we hear from our community and customers across the globe.

“Teams are dedicating real budget and effort to resilience, but many remain trapped in reactive mode. Technology alone cannot solve problems – it needs people with the knowledge and expertise, plus investment, to be able to succeed. Organisations must adopt new ways of working, in order to shift from firefighting to innovation, without compromising reliability.”

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“In today’s competitive environment, operational resilience is no longer a nice-to-have but rather a strategic imperative,” added Cullen Childress, Chief Product Officer at SolarWinds.

“Achieving it requires more than just adopting new technology. Organisations must equip their IT teams with the right tools, workflows, and talent to stay agile and responsive. When obstacles are removed and resilience is built into daily operations, IT becomes a true driver of competitive.”