INOC Publishes Results From the 2026 State of IT and Network Operations Survey of Industry Professionals

INOC, a Xerox IT Solutions company, is pleased to announce the release of results from its first-annual State of IT and Network Operations Report. The report features responses from 152 professionals.

Participants were asked questions about what challenges organizations face today, where they're investing, how they're thinking about AI, and what they're choosing to keep in-house versus outsourcing.Here are some of the key takeaways:

1. AI adopters are 21 percentage points more likely to rank tool/platform integration as a top challenge

Among survey respondents, AI adopters were more likely to cite tool and platform integration as a top challenge. The intuitive assumption would be these organizations are further along the maturity curve and their tooling is largely in order.

The data tells a different story: rather than resolving integration challenges, adopting AI appears to introduce new ones.

"AI becomes more useful when you've got access to more information. I want to understand why things are going bad. Well, if I've got access to more data, AI will derive what’s really happening. So it doesn't surprise me in the least that AI adopters are more concerned about integration."

— Jim Martin, VP of Technology, Managed Services, Xerox IT Solutions

2. AI adopters are 27 percentage points less likely to rank rising operational costs as a top priority

It could be that AI is already delivering ROI that offsets cost concerns, or perhaps it reflects that organizations adopting AI have more budget flexibility to begin with.

"The pushback I hear from a lot of small IT orgs is that they're kind of afraid of being replaced. So they don't really invest in tools, because they think they're the value-add to solve the problem, and they don't want to be replaced by AI either. So they try to keep themselves as the person doing the solving and give themselves value versus investing in tools."

— Greg DePratt, Solution Architect II, Xerox IT Solutions

3. Organizations that rate their incident management capabilities lower are less likely to invest in incident management tools, not more.

Counterintuitively, organizations that rate their own incident management capabilities lower are actually less likely to invest in incident management tools. The analysis found a 17.5 percentage point drop in the likelihood of investing in incident management platforms for each point lower an organization scores itself on incident management capability.

At the same time, organizations with higher overall operational maturity are 24 percentage points more likely to make that same investment.

Unfortunately, this suggests organizations with the greatest need may be the least likely to act on it. Those already operating at a higher level continue to invest and pull further ahead, while those falling behind tend to stay there.

"One of the things we run into a lot is when we talk to these companies, they have their own internal pool of engineers that see the issues and fix them on the fly, so they're not necessarily structured. I think there's a little bit of hesitancy—feeling that if we put them in a structured workflow, it would only slow them down rather than just knocking out and resolving the issue."

— Martin Dewald, Solutions Manager, Xerox IT Solutions

4. Organizations with stronger event/alarm correlation capabilities were 36 percentage points more likely to outsource security operations.

You might think internal capability would equal a reduction in outsourcing needs, but participants with stronger event/alarm correlation capabilities were 36 percentage points more likely to outsource security operations. That said, organizations with higher overall operational maturity were 11 percentage points less likely to outsource security.

"When a team is running a very sophisticated operation, they can clearly draw a line around what they want somebody else to do. 'I've broken my process into these blocks, I can have this process handled by an outsourced organization, and I understand exactly what the inputs and outputs are very clearly.' That's an ideal scenario for outsourcing, because it reduces your costs."

— Prasad Ravi, Former VP of Product Management, Xerox IT Solutions

The full report features detailed breakdowns of survey responses, in-depth analysis, and further expert commentary from the Xerox IT Solutions team. Check out the report to stay ahead of the curve.

Read the Full Report >