Trends include growing dependence on remote access, increased bandwidth demand and difficulty in troubleshooting
Enterprise IT teams face substantial challenges in successfully managing hybrid networks, according to Viavi Solutions’s newly released 2018 State of the Network report. For the second year in a row, IT professionals said that their most pressing challenge was identifying whether issues are caused by the network, system or application.
This is Viavi’s 11th annual survey of IT professionals; results were drawn from a survey of more than 600 respondents that included CIOs, IT directors and network engineers, the company said.
“Based on this year’s State of the Network, you’ve really got to feel for enterprise IT teams,” said Douglas Roberts, VP and GM for Viavi’s enterprise & cloud business unit, in a statement. “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.”
Enterprise networks are getting faster and more software-centric, Viavi found: more than 40% of its respondents reported that their networks had transitioned to 40 Gb Ethernet and nearly one-third had adopted the 100 GbE standard. Survey respondents also expected that implementation of software-defined networks would hit the 50% mark by 2019.
Among the key takeaways from the survey:
-The top challenge cited by respondents was “determining whether problems are caused by the network, application or system.” Viavi said that 52% of respondents listed that issue as their top challenge, which was also the top issue cited in last year’s survey.
-More than 90% 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,” Viavi found.
-Most enterprises have embraced the cloud, Viavi found, and among the respondents whose companies had adopted cloud-based operations, two-thirds said that one in four applications are running in the cloud. The other one-third said that more than a quarter of their applications are currently running in the cloud.
-Asked to identify the top two challenges of cloud migration from a network engineering perspective, 88% of respondents cited deployment complexity and 86% chose loss of visibility and control. Close behind were end-user experience (84%) service-level agreement enforcement (83%) and reliability issues (82%).
Viavi’s full report is available here.
