Network clogging catching Aussie business on the hop
Network clogging catching Aussie business on the hop
Approximately 78% of Australian organisations have experienced an incident of significant degradation in network or application performance as a result of an unanticipated WAN or Internet traffic increase in the last 12 months, according to a new survey conducted by application traffic management systems provider Packeteer, and systems integrator Dimension Data Australia.
"This survey shows that application performance degradation and network congestion are significantly impacting Australian organisations," said Peter Owen, territory manager, Australia & New Zealand for Packeteer. "Until enterprises implement solutions that specifically address application performance issues, the problem will only get worse."
Only 11 percent of organisations surveyed said no when asked, "Has your company experienced an incident of significant degradation in network or application performance as a result of an unanticipated WAN or Internet traffic increase in the last 12 months?" The remaining 11 percent said they were 'not sure'.
When asked, "How do you know when there is application performance degradation on your network?," 73% of organisations said they only knew they had problems when employees complained. 'Monitoring of network performance' (16.2%) and 'monitoring of application performance' (2.7%) raised the alarm at fewer than one in five organisations. The different sorts of human alarms included 'calls to the help desk' (37.8%), 'employee complaints' (24.3%), 'management complaints' (8.1%) and 'personal experience using the network' (2.7%). A further 8.1% of organisations chose 'other'.
"The responses to this question suggest two things," said Mr Owen. "Firstly, that the traditional means of alerting managers to poor application performance are often ineffective and fail to take advantage of both currently installed and available technology. And secondly, that application performance degradation is sufficiently disruptive to cause employees and managers to call help desks or personally complain to IT and network managers. There's clearly a lot of pain out there."
The survey was completed in June and July this year by IT and network managers responding to an online campaign conducted by Packeteer and Dimension Data Australia. The 42 organisations which responded all operate within the corporate or government sectors.
Packeteer believes the problems identified in the survey are closely associated with the increasing use of open networks and with their heavy reliance on the Internet in enterprise environments. In this new environment, critical business applications can lose the bandwidth battle to less urgent traffic such as casual web surfing, large email attachments, streaming media and file transfers. Organisations lose control of their networks, and application performance fails to meet users' needs.
The solution to the problem, according to Packeteer, is for organisations to look to implement solutions that allow more active bandwidth management, including monitoring and control of traffic by application, with the result being increased network performance, improved employee productivity, and most importantly, a possible increase in the bottom line profits of an organisation.
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