VIAVI Solutions Announces 14th Annual State of the Network Survey

On 8th April, VIAVI Solutions the results of its 14th annual State of the Network global study of enterprise networking and security challenges. Notably, The survey provides key insights into how organizations are adapting.

In a highlight, almost two-thirds of the respondents are looking forward to increased spending in 2021 to deploy new technologies. This includes technologies such as SD-WAN, private 5G and AI operations. The study also mentioned support of a rise in use of unified communications (UC) and collaboration tools.

Details of the Study by VIAVI Solutions

IT teams have adapted to the disruptive challenges of 2020. The survey reveals that the teams have adapted to managing end-user experience in WFH. What's more, respondents said that now they were spending at least 10 hours a week addressing issues related to UC.

Since many organizations are looking to extend WFH indefinitely, the importance of network and application access has skyrocketed. However, the study also noted a growing skill gap. This gap hampers troubleshooting UC and other applications. Incidentally, most of the respondents noted that they lacked the talent to solve performance issues in applications. This gap was most acute among organizations with less than $2 billion in revenue. So much so that among such companies, more than 90 percent cited difficulty in attracting suitable candidates.

Charles Thompson, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise and Cloud, VIAVI Solutions, talked about the last year's impact on enterprises. He said that the IT teams “adapted to maintain smooth service delivery and optimal end-user experience". Furthermore, he noted that the challenges have not gone away, citing the study. Thompson also expressed worry over the "widening skills gap", which caused troubleshooting delays and rose security risks.

Shamus McGillicuddy, Vice President of Research, Network Management, Enterprise Management Associates highlighted the results of the study. He said that the study showed that “the skills gap is real". He also said that it did not matter if teams were working with legacy or next-generation solutions. Furthemore, McGillicuddy noted that there were ways to reduce the gap. Firstly, he said that IT companies need to adopt "network management tools with role-based workflows". These are aimed at empowering lower-level admins. A second option was to embrace network automation tools.

Additional Survey Findings

• Organizations have embraced the cloud when it comes to hosting critical applications, citing “improved service availability and reliability” as the top reason for migration.
• IT teams remain committed to deploying high-speed networks. More than 90 percent will deploy 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) during the next three years, while 80 percent are planning to deploy 400GbE.
• There are 87% NetOps teams which detect security threats and mitigating them. This figure is up by more than 25% from last year.
• The SUNBURST cyber attack affected around 51% organizations participating in the study.

State of the Network Global Study Methodology

VIAVI Solutions (and previously Network Instruments) has conducted its State of the Network global study for 14 consecutive years, drawing insight about network trends and painting a picture of the challenges faced by IT teams. The organization collected a total of 794 responses. The respondents included network engineers, IT directors, security engineers and CIOs worldwide.

The study was both vertically and geographically diverse. A survey of network and security professional, conducted beforehand, helped designed the study questionnaire.