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March 13, 2012

State of the Network 2012: More Video, Cloud and IT Involvement

By Tammy Wolf, TMCnet Web Editor

Before April has a chance for showers to bring May flowers, there may be another type of storm on the horizon – a management storm for IT teams.

That’s a notion reached at by Network Instruments (News - Alert), a global leader in network and application performance monitoring in its “State of the Network Global Study,” an annual research report that aims to obtain an agnostic, global perspective on what exactly is occurring within the IT landscape.



This year’s study, which included 163 network professionals from organizations across North America, Europe and beyond, honed in on IT management insights related to three separate areas: video, cloud computing and application monitoring. Overall, the results revealed that today’s IT teams are facing severe monitoring challenges due to multiple forms of cloud computing, as well as significantly increased bandwidth demands.

“While IT teams embrace cloud services and video conferencing as a way to increase cost savings and business flexibility, these technologies introduce new components and environments which make ensuring positive end-user experience all the more challenging,” said Brad Reinboldt, senior product manager of Network Instruments, who spoke with TMCnet prior to the study’s release. “The reported lack of monitoring tools, quality metrics, and visibility create serious obstacles that prevent IT from effectively managing performance and jeopardize costly technology investments.” 

According to the team at Network Instruments, 2012 is looking to be the year that video really takes off, as more and more enterprises continue to jump on the video conferencing bandwagon. The survey found that 56 percent of respondents indicated they have discussed implementing some level of video within the year, with another 15 percent stating that enterprise-level deployment is on the calendar for 2012.

However, even with a total of 71 percent ready and armed to embrace video, 53 percent admitted hesitancy to adoption due to a substantial learning curve and a lack of knowledge and training of this technology present in their respective enterprises. Respondents indicating difficulties allocating and monitoring bandwidth fell closely behind at 47 percent, and a lack of tools to manage video performance made up another 47 percent of participants.

Accordingly, a lack of standardized metrics to monitor video quality is further compounding these issues, as today’s network professionals typically rely on a mish-mash of metrics to evaluate quality, including latency (76 percent), packet loss (69 percent) and jitter (60 percent).

But, according to Network Instruments’ Reinboldt, these stumbling blocks don’t necessarily mean comprehensive video adoption is too far off.

“I think video really is such a leap in technology from simply picking up the phone,” he told TMCnet. “But, given users are pretty technology-savvy, at least from the standpoint of usability, I think individuals are going to pick up on that technology and embrace the whole concept of being able to stream video.”

Agreeing with this notion, Charles Thompson, director of Product Strategy for Network Instruments, said, “As [video] becomes more commonplace, and as people start to experience issues, the education of how to address concerns that occur, what things to watch for, and people do more pre-deployment testing and in production use of these technologies, I think you’ll see that number decline dramatically in the very near term.”

In determining how commonplace cloud deployment is in enterprise organizations, as well as how it’s being leveraged and the experiences they’ve had with doing so, Network Instruments discovered that 60 percent are currently utilizing cloud computing, with software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) being the No. 1 cloud services model being taken advantage of. Meanwhile, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) represented a reasonable portion of respondent use.

Interestingly, the study also found that 40 percent are leveraging the private cloud – a number that Network Instruments expects to grow as people start to take advantage of newer abilities to deploy applications to their end-users, explained Thompson

While a vast majority of those enterprises to have already moved to the cloud cited a successful experience, the study also uncovered a rather concerning trend, and that’s that enterprises are experiencing a decline in their ability to monitor and trouble issues in the cloud. The culprits, according to Thompson, are limitations in visibility, and lack of education for how the cloud works and how exactly to operate within it.

“The concerning factor here is too many organizations are not seeing or taking advantage of that capability,” Thompson told TMCnet. “Initially, it’s that sort of loss of control when you deploy this technology that leaves a lot of people feeling disconnected from the service itself and from the technology… Hopefully as organizations become familiar with cloud, and we as an industry do a better job at educating on how to monitor and troubleshoot issues which occur in the cloud, we’ll start to see those numbers balance back out again and see more organizations staying the same or improving their visibility and troubleshooting in the cloud.”

For the fifth year in a row, and ever since the study began, Network Instruments found that an overwhelming percentage of respondents – 83 percent – pointed to determining where problems are occurring – whether it’s in the network, system or applications – is their biggest concern. This, according to Thompson, is “not a good sign,” as 40 percent said their average response time to issues is increasing.

Luckily for IT, the necessity to drill down to the root cause of a problem, as well as the likelihood that network traffic demands will increase significantly over the next few years, is making way for IT to serve a greater, and more intrinsic, role in the enterprise.

“The one bright spot in all of this, is that organizations are starting to look at IT more as a service,” said Thompson. “So we need to look at things and be able to identify if any aspect of the delivery is being impacted… This concept of looking at service delivery is really going to shift the way organizations are handling IT.

“In what I’ve seen in talking with organizations, it’s really starting to happen now. Organizations are really starting to, at least from a tools perspective, break down the silos of IT, start to look at the delivery of content in terms of services, and not necessarily delineate such strict lines between security, networking, systems, applications and so forth. As a result, you have a natural progression toward not only identifying issues, but identifying the root cause of issues,” he continued.



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