2013 State of the Network Study

Annual State of the Network Global Study Offers IT Management Insights

The results suggest although organizations are rapidly deploying emerging unified communications (UC), cloud, mobile, and network technologies, network teams lack visibility into applications and end-user experience due to relying on legacy monitoring tools.

Many technologies we spoke about as emerging a short time ago, such as BYOD, videoconferencing,
and 40 Gb, are quickly approaching mainstream status, as companies look to quickly boost productivity and cost savings. Unfortunately, many network teams are relying on outdated monitoring strategies to manage performance and user expectations for these new initiatives.

What’s particularly challenging about this moment in time for IT is that the focus isn’t on one disruptive technology; rather, engineers have to establish and maintain visibility into the cloud, mobile devices, and real-time communications, all while dealing with increased user and business expectations. IT teams will need to invest in management solutions that cover and correlate performance across as many of these new applications and infrastructure technologies as possible, and ideally all of them.

This year, we engaged 170 network professionals to understand and quantify new technology adoption trends and daily IT challenges. Respondents were asked, via third-party web portal, to answer a series of questions on the impact, challenges, and benefits of UC, cloud computing, and application performance management.

The results were based on responses by network engineers, IT directors, and CIOs in North America, Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia, and South America. Responses were collected from January 25, 2013, to April 30, 2013.