Redmond Magazine, a publication that caters to the Microsoft IT community, recently conducted a survey of 300 IT professionals that work for companies with 100 or more employees. Ipswitch (News - Alert)'s network management division sponsored the survey.
The biggest IT monitoring headache, according to the respondents, was the lack of a unified network view. IT pros also expressed frustration with having to coordinate information from multiple tools.
A unified view goes hand-in-hand with tool consolidation. IT pros want to combine monitoring, application management, wireless network control and bandwidth management into a single consolidated platform.
"The last figure caught our attention," wrote Ennio Carboni in an Ipswitch company blog post. "A good number of respondents considered tool consolidation, better application management and better wireless control to be one single priority."
Some providers are working to create this unified network view. Virtela (News - Alert), a company that provides cloud IT services, offers its clients a real-time view of all of its services through the VirtelaView customer portal. By moving IT services into the cloud, Virtela eliminates heterogeneous network tools and provides unified network management for multiple business locations.
Redmond Magazine's survey also found that although IT pros don't always trust freeware, they don't want to overpay for network monitoring tools. Sixty-three percent of respondents still purchase network monitoring tools and install them onsite, but only 15 percent utilize network monitoring freeware.
Gartner (News - Alert) recently reported that 65 percent of IT budgets are allocated for day-to-day network management. According to Virtela, companies could save 80 percent in upfront capex and 30 percent in ongoing opex by transitioning IT services to the cloud and using managed services. Imagine what IT professionals could accomplish with more money and more time, two beautiful commodities that often elude today's businesses.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson