Over two-thirds of network managers spend at least 25
days per year determining the cause of network slowdowns affecting
application performance.
The worldwide survey of 600
CIOs, network engineers and IT managers found solving
application issues takes the largest amount of time for network
professionals. Thirty per cent of network professionals spend 26-50
days annually replicating network issues, while 41 per cent spend
up to 25 days per year attempting to replicate network problems,
according to the research from Network Instruments.
The biggest problem with network issues affecting application
performance was bandwidth consumption. Over one third cited
bandwidth consumption issues as the key offender, while 32%
reported application latency and delay issues as the second most
common problem. This can be a major problem for businesses
deployong
converged networks.
"Over the last two years, while IT teams purchased new tools to
optimise applications and traffic, the amount of time spent
troubleshooting performance problems increased," said Ian Cummins,
vice-president of EMEA for Network Instruments.
The survey also found 66% of organisations have implemented or
are planning to implement
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) within the next 12 months.
Quality of service and the impact of VoIP on other applications
proved to be the largest VoIP concerns for network
professionals.
Multi protocol label
switching (MPLS) is another area of growth. Migration to MPLS
networks is in the
early stages of adoption according to the research. The survey
found that 35% of respondents will have migrated to MPLS networks
in the next year, while 55% do not intend to migrate to MPLS.