IT users are no longer tethered to the corporate network – they’re connecting to various network infrastructures, whether from home or hot spots. But many IT users and decision-makers don’t really understand how the network actually affects their work or their business, and this could put them at a competitive disadvantage.
Solution provider Dimension Data has just released a global study, called the Network Performance Frustration Research Report, which looks at network-related frustration felt by IT users and decision-makers and the discrepancies between perceived and actual experiences.
While 76 per cent of survey respondents were satisfied with overall network performance, 30 per cent cited frequent network crashes or poorly performing networks as a source of frustration. IT users found bandwidth-heavy applications, such as video, the most frustrating.
“It’s becoming a lot harder for the help desk and support teams to resolve issues because there are so many components to a network-based application, so we found some frustration from the user community,” said Darryl Wilson, regional practice director at Dimension Data Canada, a solution provider with a focus on networking technologies.
There’s a gap between how fast IT decision-makers perceive network problems are resolved and users’ actual experience. While more than 40 per cent concurred that IT users have their network problems resolved eventually, the majority still believe such network problems are resolved instantly, even though that is not typically the case.
Also, IT users coming out of university are accustomed to different features and functionality, such as instant messaging, YouTube and Facebook. As they come into the workplace, said Wilson, they’re demanding the same sorts of capabilities. But many of these applications put more stress on the network infrastructure – not just from a technical perspective but a supportability perspective.
IT departments, however, lack a strong understanding of network performance issues: 48 per cent of IT decision-makers don’t budget for continuous network spending and half believe their networks are already future-proofed. Network performance is often not linked to their company’s return on investment.
“The results show they truly aren’t clear on the impact that this has on the network,” said Wilson. “If a new application is being rolled out, in many cases the network team is not even involved in that project, versus being more proactive and understanding what the traffic pattern is going to produce.”
While 30 per cent of IT users and decision-makers report frequent computer crashes and slow-running software, only a third of IT departments have defined processes for handling network performance issues. And less than 40 per cent of IT departments have the capability to monitor network performance.
Most organizations don’t have a network traffic policy in place, which would provide guidance on the types of traffic allowed on the network. But they’ll have to start creating these policies, said Wilson, so the IT department can prioritize mission-critical applications.
Users waste at least two hours per month in network delays, which adds up to two or three days per year. The biggest performance bottlenecks were file transfers and network logins.
Despite this, one in five don’t see the network as an essential budget item. “As the world becomes flatter and people are more dispersed, the network really is the foundation for running the business,” said Wilson.
The value of the network to the organization is something that’s often not clearly defined, said Jayanth Angl, senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research Group. And that makes it challenging to make a case for network upgrades or investments. “There’s a lot of financial considerations that make moving forward much more difficult,” he added.
Nowadays, IP networks could be running everything from critical enterprise applications to physical security. With real-time applications that fall under the unified communications (UC) umbrella, there are typically rigid quality-of-service requirements. Poor network performance or congestion can have a dramatic impact on a voice conversation or videoconference, and in some cases make those applications unusable. “Network latency, jitter and packet loss are tremendously important in the context of real-time communications,” he said.
The early adopters of UC are typically more sophisticated organizations that are taking an integrated and consolidated approach to delivering applications, said Angl. To start, organizations should look at their long-term communications strategy, how they want to improve collaboration across the organization and potentially with business partners, and what will be required to make this work. And this could include a large-scale network upgrade or network service migration as part of the broader UC deployment.
