“Based on this year’s State of the Network report, you’ll really understand the sentiment of enterprise IT teams,” said Douglas Roberts, Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise and Cloud Business Unit at VIAVI Solutions. “They’re losing control of infrastructure and services as they migrate to the cloud, while simultaneously supporting employees who may be working from anywhere, yet they remain on the sidelines to maintain performance and resolve issues. They need solutions to increase their visibility and speed of response, as well as smarter analytics.”.
 
The highlights of the 2018 study include:
• IT teams responsible for resolving cloud issues: 65% of respondents said network teams were responsible for troubleshooting cloud issues, while 11% were unsure and 24% said no. Underlying this finding is the fact that network teams may not have been involved in the initial cloud migration, as that decision may have been made and implemented within a business unit.
• Employees accessing resources remotely: More than 90% of companies have a portion of their workforce accessing the network or application services from a remote site, and 54% say that a quarter of their employees are doing so.
• Application performance monitoring challenges: 52% of respondents said their main challenge was determining whether problems are caused by the network, the application, or the system – this was also cited as a top challenge in 2017. This year, the issue topped others by a wide margin, including: bug and patch management (16%), latency and delay measurement (13%), understanding the user experience (10%), and bandwidth consumption monitoring (9%).  
• Emerging technology implementations: Companies continue to aggressively adopt new technologies, including server virtualization (79%), private cloud (60%), public cloud (56%), software-defined networking (43%), 40 GbE (43%) and 100 GbE (27%).
• Growth in bandwidth demand: One of the drivers of emerging technology adoption is the growth in bandwidth demand, with companies forecasting continued growth. Between 2018 and 2020, 42% expect demand to grow between 51% and 100%, 40% expect growth of up to 50%, and 18% expect growth of more than 100%.
 
Four key aspects: What should IT service delivery teams do?
• Adopt a cloud-by-default approach: Understand that if you're not monitoring in the cloud, you soon will be. If your company is moving to AWS, Microsoft Azure, or another provider, your networking team should be able to develop solutions to extend visibility and performance analytics from your on-premises data center to any Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider.
• Don't be SaaS-ed: What visibility do engineers have into accessing Software as a Service (SaaS) across their networks? When users complain about problems, how will they exonerate or troubleshoot the related network issues? Many existing networking tools cannot provide information about SaaS applications. Engineers must be able to provide metrics on network connectivity to any type of cloud service.
• End-to-end coverage: With applications delivered through a hybrid cloud-on-premises architecture, engineers need complete visibility into the application path and understanding of the user's application journey to the cloud, the data center, and back. Missing pieces in the journey compromise IT's ability to accurately identify and resolve breakdowns.
• Gain remote user intelligence: Since users can access services from anywhere and complain about erratic issues with a high degree of subjectivity, how do engineers verify and resolve remote complaints? A new use case for an older technology is synthetic testing in the form of downloadable lightweight agents. These agents help clarify, from the remote user's perspective, what happens when those users access critical services.
 
Methodology of the global study “State of the Network”
VIAVI (formerly Network Instruments) has conducted its global "State of the Network" study for 11 consecutive years, gaining insights into network trends and outlining the challenges IT teams face. The study questions were designed based on a survey of network professionals. The results were compiled from the insights of more than 600 respondents, including network engineers, IT directors, and CIOs from around the world. In addition to geographic diversity, the study population was evenly distributed across networks and business verticals of varying sizes. Responses were collected in March 2018 via online surveys.

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