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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

A new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value reveals that enterprises are expected to significantly scale AI-enabled workflows, many driven by agentic AI, relying on them for improved decision making and automation. The AI Projects to Profits study revealed that respondents expect AI-enabled workflows to grow from 3% today to 25% by the end of 2025. With 70% of surveyed executives indicating that agentic AI is important to their organization's future, the research suggests that many organizations are actively encouraging experimentation ...

Respondents predict that agentic AI will play an increasingly prominent role in their interactions with technology vendors over the coming years and are positive about the benefits it will bring, according to The Race to an Agentic Future: How Agentic AI Will Transform Customer Experience, a report from Cisco ...

A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...