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How the Network Stole Christmas

Annual Ipswitch Survey Reveals that Holidays Continue to Create Stress for IT Professionals
Daniel Okine

In its second annual “Happy Holidays?” survey, Ipswitch surveyed more than 200 IT professionals to gauge the impact of their job on the ability to enjoy the holiday season. Jump to infographic.

To the surprise of no one, IT pros, yet again, are getting scrooged by some of the most common network issues or “grinches”. Taking a deeper dive into the data reveals that:

Who’s Feeling Like “Bob Cratchit”?

49 percent of all respondents noted they are either on-call or working this holiday season, and nearly the same amount (48 percent) will be thinking about work even when they’re not in the office!

Remote Access is the Most Common Holiday Problem

During the holidays many companies allow their employees to forgo the office and work from home – sounds nice, right? Not for IT professionals! Survey respondents noted that more than half (57 percent) of users experience problems with network access. Other user and network issues include poor application performance and forgotten passwords (18 percent each).

Who’s Topping IT’s “Naughty List”?

When asked who would top the “IT naughty list” respondents said that executives (24 percent), fellow employees (20 percent) and vendors (12 percent) would receive coal in their stockings. Notably, nearly one third (32 percent) of all survey respondents believed all three groups of people should top the “network naughty list”.

Gadgets “Grinches”

Some of the gadgets topping our wish lists this year actually pose threats to our networks by draining wireless bandwidth and application performance. According to the IT pros polled, the gadgets identified as most likely to disrupt their IT network were smartphones (35 percent), wearable technology (26 percent), laptops (23 percent) and tablets (16 percent).

Thinking Ahead to a More Prosperous 2015

When asked what New Year’s resolutions were most important to them and would be most beneficial, solving network and IT problems faster tied with Increasing IT security measures, both at (43 percent). Tracking down and finding the organizations bandwidth hoarders was the third most popular response (14 percent).

So while many of us are doing last minute gift shopping and making New Year’s Eve plans, network managers and system administrators are once again hard at work keeping business networks up and running and making themselves available to solve your problems.

Daniel Okine is Director of Product Management at Ipswitch.

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How the Network Stole Christmas

Annual Ipswitch Survey Reveals that Holidays Continue to Create Stress for IT Professionals
Daniel Okine

In its second annual “Happy Holidays?” survey, Ipswitch surveyed more than 200 IT professionals to gauge the impact of their job on the ability to enjoy the holiday season. Jump to infographic.

To the surprise of no one, IT pros, yet again, are getting scrooged by some of the most common network issues or “grinches”. Taking a deeper dive into the data reveals that:

Who’s Feeling Like “Bob Cratchit”?

49 percent of all respondents noted they are either on-call or working this holiday season, and nearly the same amount (48 percent) will be thinking about work even when they’re not in the office!

Remote Access is the Most Common Holiday Problem

During the holidays many companies allow their employees to forgo the office and work from home – sounds nice, right? Not for IT professionals! Survey respondents noted that more than half (57 percent) of users experience problems with network access. Other user and network issues include poor application performance and forgotten passwords (18 percent each).

Who’s Topping IT’s “Naughty List”?

When asked who would top the “IT naughty list” respondents said that executives (24 percent), fellow employees (20 percent) and vendors (12 percent) would receive coal in their stockings. Notably, nearly one third (32 percent) of all survey respondents believed all three groups of people should top the “network naughty list”.

Gadgets “Grinches”

Some of the gadgets topping our wish lists this year actually pose threats to our networks by draining wireless bandwidth and application performance. According to the IT pros polled, the gadgets identified as most likely to disrupt their IT network were smartphones (35 percent), wearable technology (26 percent), laptops (23 percent) and tablets (16 percent).

Thinking Ahead to a More Prosperous 2015

When asked what New Year’s resolutions were most important to them and would be most beneficial, solving network and IT problems faster tied with Increasing IT security measures, both at (43 percent). Tracking down and finding the organizations bandwidth hoarders was the third most popular response (14 percent).

So while many of us are doing last minute gift shopping and making New Year’s Eve plans, network managers and system administrators are once again hard at work keeping business networks up and running and making themselves available to solve your problems.

Daniel Okine is Director of Product Management at Ipswitch.

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...