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Keeping Employees Connected in Remote-Work Environments

The use of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) solutions has increased since the start of the pandemic, and this increased use has created challenges for IT teams, according to a survey commissioned by NETSCOUT SYSTEMS.

According to Gallup's annual Work and Education Poll, one in four US workers now work entirely from home with the number of remote-work telecommuting days doubling since last year. This dramatic increase places an added burden on IT departments to address complex UC&C solutions and manage the rise in IT helpdesk calls and tickets, especially given the added complexity of having multiple solutions without the visibility to identify issues.

Survey findings include:

■ 97% of respondents stated that collaboration platforms, applications, and tools have become much more critical in the current work environment.

■ In response to the increased use of UC&C platforms, 85% stated they were upgrading their solutions to provide a better workforce experience.

■ Respondents stated that UC&C platforms have become much more critical to their business with 85% of those surveyed indicating usage has either increased or significantly increased.

■ More than 73% stated that increased usage has been problematic, citing cybersecurity, privacy concerns, response time, network visibility, bandwidth issues, and ensuring users have the proper equipment as leading factors.

■ Problematic UC&C platforms place an incremental burden on IT departments, with respondents citing an increase in calls to IT (63%), open tickets (59%), user frustration (55%) resulting from issues associated with UC&C platforms.

■ When asked how many collaboration platforms and tools they supported, 29% stated 3-4, 34% said 5-9, 12% stated 10-15, while 10% stated 16 or more.

"With so many people working from home, there has been an inevitable increase in the reliance on real-time services like UC&C," stated Paul Barrett, CTO, Enterprise, NETSCOUT. "However, such services are highly sensitive to network problems such as packet loss and latency, and as a result, IT departments need to quickly understand the root cause of issues such as a saturated VPN concentrator or a problem that resides with a software-as-a-service provider. Hence the need for comprehensive monitoring solutions that give them the visibility they need to ensure a better remote-work experience."

"UC&C solutions and network infrastructure combine to serve up the best possible end-user experience," stated Richard Costello, Senior Research Analyst, IDC. "But, that's no easy feat. Complete network visibility and control enabled by network analytics solutions facilitate the reliable real-time delivery of enhanced communications and collaboration in the onrushing digital era."

Methodology: Respondents to the survey fielded between Sept. 17 and Oct. 15, 2020, included 300 IT decision-makers from large enterprises with $1 billion or more in annual revenue.

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Keeping Employees Connected in Remote-Work Environments

The use of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) solutions has increased since the start of the pandemic, and this increased use has created challenges for IT teams, according to a survey commissioned by NETSCOUT SYSTEMS.

According to Gallup's annual Work and Education Poll, one in four US workers now work entirely from home with the number of remote-work telecommuting days doubling since last year. This dramatic increase places an added burden on IT departments to address complex UC&C solutions and manage the rise in IT helpdesk calls and tickets, especially given the added complexity of having multiple solutions without the visibility to identify issues.

Survey findings include:

■ 97% of respondents stated that collaboration platforms, applications, and tools have become much more critical in the current work environment.

■ In response to the increased use of UC&C platforms, 85% stated they were upgrading their solutions to provide a better workforce experience.

■ Respondents stated that UC&C platforms have become much more critical to their business with 85% of those surveyed indicating usage has either increased or significantly increased.

■ More than 73% stated that increased usage has been problematic, citing cybersecurity, privacy concerns, response time, network visibility, bandwidth issues, and ensuring users have the proper equipment as leading factors.

■ Problematic UC&C platforms place an incremental burden on IT departments, with respondents citing an increase in calls to IT (63%), open tickets (59%), user frustration (55%) resulting from issues associated with UC&C platforms.

■ When asked how many collaboration platforms and tools they supported, 29% stated 3-4, 34% said 5-9, 12% stated 10-15, while 10% stated 16 or more.

"With so many people working from home, there has been an inevitable increase in the reliance on real-time services like UC&C," stated Paul Barrett, CTO, Enterprise, NETSCOUT. "However, such services are highly sensitive to network problems such as packet loss and latency, and as a result, IT departments need to quickly understand the root cause of issues such as a saturated VPN concentrator or a problem that resides with a software-as-a-service provider. Hence the need for comprehensive monitoring solutions that give them the visibility they need to ensure a better remote-work experience."

"UC&C solutions and network infrastructure combine to serve up the best possible end-user experience," stated Richard Costello, Senior Research Analyst, IDC. "But, that's no easy feat. Complete network visibility and control enabled by network analytics solutions facilitate the reliable real-time delivery of enhanced communications and collaboration in the onrushing digital era."

Methodology: Respondents to the survey fielded between Sept. 17 and Oct. 15, 2020, included 300 IT decision-makers from large enterprises with $1 billion or more in annual revenue.

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The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

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While IT leaders are becoming more comfortable and adept at balancing workloads across on-premises, colocation data centers and the public cloud, there's a key component missing: connectivity, according to the 2025 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite ...

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