With applications increasingly in the cloud, IT teams are losing control, challenged to manage network performance and security
VIAVI released the results of its 11th annual State of the Network global study. Findings demonstrate that a significant portion of enterprise IT teams are unsure how to handle cloud migration challenges. The annual study was compiled from the insights of over 600 respondents, including network engineers, IT directors and CIOs from around the world.
“Based on this year’s State of the Network, you’ve really got to feel for enterprise IT teams,” said Douglas Roberts, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise & Cloud Business Unit, VIAVI Solutions. “They’re losing control of infrastructure and services that are migrating to the cloud, while simultaneously supporting employees who may be working anywhere and yet remain on the hook to maintain performance and resolve issues. They need solutions to increase their scope of visibility and speed of response, as well as smarter analytics.”
Highlights of the 2018 study include:
- IT teams responsible for resolving cloud issues: Sixty-five percent of respondents said network teams were responsible for troubleshooting cloud issues, while 11 percent were unsure and 24 percent said they were not. Underlying the significance of this finding is that network teams may not be involved in the initial migration to the cloud, as that may have been decided and implemented within a business unit.
- Employees accessing resources remotely: Over ninety percent of enterprises have some portion of their workforce accessing network or application services from a remote site, with 54 percent saying a quarter of their employees are doing so.
- Application performance monitoring challenges: Fifty-two percent of respondents said their top challenge was determining whether problems are caused by the network, application or system – this was also cited as a top challenge in 2017. This year the issue outweighed others by a wide margin, including: managing application bugs and patches (16 percent), measuring latency and delay issues (13 percent), understanding user experience (10 percent) and monitoring bandwidth consumption (9 percent).
- Emerging technology deployments: Enterprises continue to aggressively adopt new technologies, including server virtualization (79 percent), private cloud (60 percent), public cloud (56 percent), software-defined networks (43 percent), 40 GbE (43 percent) and 100 GbE (27 percent).
- Bandwidth demand growth: One driver of emerging technology adoption is bandwidth demand growth, with enterprises forecasting an ongoing surge. Between 2018 and 2020, 42 percent expect demand to grow 51-100 percent, 40 percent expect growth up to 50 percent and 18 percent expect growth of more than 100 percent.
