Around half of IT managers expect their bandwidth
requirements to grow by over 50% in the next five years, but do not
expect to see more than a 5% increase in their budgets according to
research commissioned by Viatel.
The pan-European business communications provider’s survey
warns that companies may stand to face serious
WAN problems in the future with pressures such as storage,
green technologies and compliance strongly competing for budget,
and a significant proportion of companies (28%) believing that
their bandwidth requirements would double within five years.
Driving this growth was the sheer weight of email and web
traffic with 39% of the survey seeing this as the biggest
contributor to the need for more bandwidth. 30% of the survey
believed that VoIP and converging technologies such as video on
demand would also have a significant effect on traffic in the
future, and 18% attributed the increase in bandwidth requirements
to supporting ERP and CRM systems.
"
Having adequate WAN bandwidth is critical for almost all business
activities today," said Michael Davies, product director,
Viatel. "If companies do not have sufficient bandwidth, a number of
problems can occur, including delays to external communications and
business critical applications such as order processing, billing,
ERP, finance and sales. This can translate directly to a loss of
revenue as these processes are held up in congested networks.
Considering that 20% of the survey expects their bandwidth
requirements to grow by 150% or more, the problem may well reach
boiling point in the next few years."
Even though 91% of the survey believed their bandwidth needs
would grow significantly over the next five years, three quarters
of the sample stated that increasing network bandwidth was not
their top IT concern. Preparing for the impact of the downturn in
the economy, as well as dealing with the
worsening security climate were the clear priorities with over
half (56%) of the sample making preparing and implementing business
continuity plans the top concerns for the coming year.
Protecting the business against emerging IT security threats,
such as denial-of-service attacks, also accounted for a large slice
of IT managers' budgets.
This prompted a caution from Michael Davies. "It is
understandable that putting business continuity in place and
protecting business interests against security threats has risen to
the top of the corporate agenda, but IT managers need to make sure
that they don't neglect their bandwidth or networks could grind to
a halt. Today, almost all business-critical processes run over the
network, and in order for businesses to continue operating and
trading as usual, IT managers need to make sure that they have
enough bandwidth to support these processes," he said.