WAN worries

Talari Networks, Inc. has announced the findings of an independent survey of more than 200 IT professionals worldwide. Of the respondents, 75.9 percent were from N. America and 87.9 percent worked in companies with 100 or more employees.

This research was conducted by industry analyst firm Ashton, Metzler & Associates in late 2013. The goal of the survey was to identify the current state of the WAN, including:
· The key focus of the WAN relative to supporting applications;
· The role the WAN plays relative to enabling business managers to achieve their strategic goals;
· The shift and the growth in the use of WAN services; and
· The expected change in WAN budgets.

"The survey results indicate the importance of the WAN to business success. For example, the survey results indicated that enterprise applications, such as CRM, are the leading drivers of increased MPLS traffic and one of the top drivers of the increase in Internet traffic. The survey results also indicated that on average there are 14 WAN-related incidents a year that negatively impact one or more of a company’s business-critical applications," said Jim Metzler, VP, Ashton, Metzler & Associates.

The research shows that by a very wide margin the most important factors that will impact the WAN in the next 12 months are improving application performance (42%) and providing better support to real-time applications (32.4%). However, roughly two-thirds (67.7%) of IT organizations currently don't prioritize applications or they only prioritize applications in a static manner.

When asked to indicate the ramifications to their company if one or more business-critical applications aren't performing well, the vast majority of respondents indicated the impact of degraded performance results in their CIO getting pressure from their boss or related business unit manager (44.4%); tarnished reputation of the IT organization (43.5%); and revenue loss (38.2%). Additionally, 86.5% of respondents say their WAN negatively impacts business-critical applications either occasionally or frequently.

"There's no doubt that the WAN plays an increasingly important role to a company's ability to function as business-critical, real-time applications, such as voice and video, public cloud apps and services and the use of mobile devices in the workplace continue to grow. However, while the vast majority of respondents to this survey claim the most important factors impacting the WAN are improving application performance and providing better support to real-time applications, only 20.3 percent of respondents claim their company's senior business managers often regard the WAN as being strategic to their business goals and often support the need for additional funding," said Talari's President & CEO Emerick Woods.

Woods continued, "This data points to a strong disconnect and the need for IT organizations to better align their activities with the goals of the company's business unit managers. While often difficult to fulfill those requirements, the ramifications of degraded network performance can bring a company to a complete halt, resulting in lost revenue and customers."

Other key findings in the report include:
· Prioritizing business-critical application traffic (20.3%) is as important to IT organizations as is increasing security (20.3%). Additionally, 29.5 percent of respondents said support for mobile workers will have the biggest impact, while 29 percent pointed to reducing cost.
· More than 50 percent of IT organizations use the Internet to carry between 1% and 40% of their traffic.
· The use of the Internet will grow more than the use of MPLS, and the use of each of these services will grow significantly more than the use of other WAN services, such as ATM and/or Frame Relay.
· The two primary concerns that IT organizations have with the use of MPLS are cost (43%) and uptime (23.7%) and the two primary concerns that IT organizations have with the use of the Internet are security (26.6%) and uptime (28%).
· The primary class of applications driving an increase in Internet traffic is public cloud applications and services (35.7%), followed by support for mobile users (22.7%).
· WAN budgets are more than three times as likely to increase (45.3%) as they are to decrease (14.5%).