Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business. Efficiency, after all, often translates to measurable savings of all kinds — cost, time, effort, etc. But, when the push for efficiency interferes with other important goals, a business may find itself looking at diminishing returns rather than the efficiency gains it was banking on.
We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges.
Cloud and Internet Reliance
According to the survey, 98% of companies are using or planning to use cloud infrastructure and 95% are still supporting remote workers. As a result, the network has become increasingly more complex, noted by 78% of respondents.
Consider that the modern IT environment now includes cloud — public, private and hybrid — virtual machines and network devices, and numerous applications and resources connected across the internet. Network endpoints are spread far and wide and often exist in workers' homes, which makes it challenging to gain the visibility necessary to ensure uptime, performance, and security.
Digging deeper, when asked what specifically is making network operations more challenging, the top answer was cloud environments (62%). Close behind at 55%, respondents cited overall scale, including physical and virtual devices and those not directly controlled by the IT teams, such as public cloud infrastructure and personal devices.
This reliance on the cloud and public internet means much of the network is hidden from view and out of network operators' control. In fact, 80% of respondents claim internet and cloud environments create network blind spots which can often create delays in issue remediation.
Teams Lack Critical Data
When network operations teams don't have the information they need to ensure uptime and performance, it's a problem that can lead to costly downtime. In fact, 76% of respondents said slow or missing data directly impedes resolution times. Yet, 95% of respondents say they do not get the information they need from ISPs and cloud providers, indicative of the information challenge network teams are facing. What's worse, 84% of network professionals indicated that they regularly learn about issues from users.
Asked to elaborate on the information they need but aren't getting from ISPs, survey respondents cited path latency and node or hop issues, information about route changes, DDoS attack locations, DNS issues, historical performance by path, and path packet loss. This is critical information network operations teams could use proactively to prevent network performance or availability incidents and improve issue resolution speeds.
Despite expectations for better information flow from CSPs, respondents offered a list of information they need but don't get from these providers, including security events and infrastructure issues, authentication and access issues, node and hop issues, and path latency.
This lack of visibility into cloud and internet network issues is a problem with potentially costly repercussions.
Poor network operations tools exacerbate issues
Tooling is a common approach to managing an increasingly complex network as evidenced by the 84% of organizations that use five or more network management tools. Likely purchased to support new technologies such as cloud or remote employees, the use of numerous tools adds additional complexity and costs. Interestingly, over 30% of respondents directly called out poor network operation tools for making network operations more challenging. It seems clear that organizations are struggling to find the right network operations tools to meet their needs leading to tool sprawl.
A more efficient network means better business performance
For efficient and effective network operations, observability is paramount. Lack of observability makes ensuring uptime, performance, and security more challenging and also creates delays in issue remediation. With demand for reliable IT networks at an all-time high as the workplace continues to expand and adopt remote and transitory work models, the need for end-to-end observability cannot be understated. Modern network operation tools can help network teams overcome blind spots by directly pulling in information from cloud and internet providers and consolidating network information in one place. Efficiency may be a business objective, but a reliable network must take precedence. After all, if the network goes down, so does the business.