Corporate networks across Europe are experiencing significant performance problems due to blind spots around the applications being run across them, research conducted by Ipanema Technologies and Easynet has discovered.
The study, ‘Killer Apps 2012’, found that performance problems are highly prevalent across networks, with 74% citing enterprise critical applications such as line of business, ERP or CRM, and video-based applications being those most at risk. In addition, the results unearthed a worrying trend on how such problems are discovered, with user complaints the second most common source of monitoring issues across networks.
The highlights of the pan-European findings include:
Application performance issues are on the rise across Europe
82% of respondents report speed and responsiveness problems in the past 12 months
Enterprise, line of business, voice and collaboration applications were cited by 65% of respondents as being the most likely to suffer performance problems
43% of companies highlighted that these issues are becoming ‘more frequent’
A lack of visibility when it comes to networked applications:
69% do not have visibility of the bandwidth requirements each network application requires
55% of respondents rely on the ‘final line of defence’, namely user complaints, as their primary performance metric
Nearly one in three respondents do not know the number of apps running on their corporate network
In many organisations the network is ‘over provisioned’ suggesting inefficient application of bandwidth
72% of respondents said the network is only used to its full data transmission capacity occasionally or very infrequently
The vast majority of companies (86%) report increasing bandwidth requirements
Justin Fielder, CTO at Easynet commented: “This study should trigger alarm bells for IT managers and highlights the importance of a true understanding of the performance of applications on an enterprise network. “However, the answer is not to be found in a panacea product – businesses need to combine professional auditing through in-depth analytics to establish a robust, long-term approach not just to today’s problems but to tomorrow’s too, if they are to avoid disaster.”
Thierry Grenot, CTO at Ipanema Technologies added: “Enterprises need to be more agile in order to reach the business outcomes they expect from strategic IT transformations, such as cloud computing and Unified Communications deployments. The report findings strongly suggest that businesses could benefit from understanding their networks more thoroughly in order to target bandwidth to those applications the business relies on, reducing investment in unnecessary capacity.”
He continued: “Right now there is a ‘perfect storm’ emerging as companies face an explosion of bandwidth requirements from less critical applications, coupled with the need to reduce expenditure. Today’s CIOs require a rock solid yet flexible network which is aligned to the priorities of the organisation. That necessitates a more sophisticated approach to networking which includes high levels of visibility and control in order to solve the delivery challenges posed by the complexity of cloud applications.”
The full results of the study will be announced and discussed on 23 May when both Justin Fielder, CTO at Easynet and Thierry Grenot, CTO at Ipanema will be hosting a live media video conference.