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Do You Know What Network Brownouts Are Costing You, and What You Need to Do About It?

Sergio Bea
Accedian

COVID-19 has changed a great deal this year about the way we live and work. Some things, like mass remote working and surging e-commerce sales, will long outlast the pandemic. But this creates a challenge. As businesses increasingly come to rely on high-speed, high performance networks, and the applications that run on top, what happens when brownouts occur?

The past year was all about survival. Now it's time to thrive. That means a renewed focus on network and application performance management to spur the next stage of growth, as we move out of the shadow of the pandemic.


Going Digital

Global business was already transforming digitally well before COVID-19 struck, although in some industries at a faster rate than others. Retail had become an increasingly competitive vertical, with brands under intense pressure to deliver seamless personalized experiences across multiple channels. In fact, the growing influence on online retail and direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker and Dollar Shave Club may have hastened the demise of many bricks and mortar stores including Payless ShoeSource, Gymboree and Charlotte Russe.

COVID-19 has accelerated the push to all things digital. Businesses that used to talk about digital strategy in "one- to three-year phases" must now scale-up in just days or weeks, according to McKinsey. A major part of this is about supporting the newly distributed workforce. In April, over half (51%) of Americans said they "always" work remotely.

Under Pressure

Unfortunately, network infrastructure has in many cases been unable to support these surging demands. A poll of over 1,000 IT decision makers in the US we conducted recently revealed that over 40% suffer network brownouts several times a week, while end user complaints about application performance soared by 60% due to performance degradations, excessive slowdowns and network congestion.

Nearly a third (30%) reported problems with SaaS applications like Office 365 and team collaboration tools, which have become a vital means to maintain employee productivity amidst mass remote working. Fast, uninterrupted access to such applications is not only essential, but also expected by home workers today. However, this doesn't tell the whole story. Respondents also highlighted problems with the performance of business-critical databases, streaming services that support webinars and online events, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), ERP and finance systems, and customer communication channels.

This is not only a barrier to employee but specifically to IT worker productivity. A fifth of organizations experience brownouts on a daily basis, and more than half spending an average of 2.5 hours resolving a single incident. For many, that means as much as 12.5 hours each week is wasted on network troubleshooting. This is also an issue that goes beyond staff productivity to the very heart of business performance. If you can't access and use critical databases, IT infrastructure in the public cloud and enterprise software, or interact with customers in a timely manner, everything starts to fall apart.

What's the Problem?

Nearly half (47%) of the organizations we polled blame network connectivity providers for these brownouts, as well as maintenance and upgrades (43%) and unexpected traffic increases (43%). A broader problem is that IT and network teams simply don't have visibility into performance. We found that over a quarter of network brownouts are not even discovered by IT or NetOps, but are instead found and reported by users or customers. That means problems aren't being addressed early on, before they can escalate. They have already become acute enough that end users are starting to notice.

That's bad news not only for staff productivity and satisfaction, but also your brand reputation. Both can have a serious knock-on effect on the bottom line. So where should IT and NetOps leaders turn?

Getting Proactive

Active monitoring can certainly help to resolve the top three issues highlighted by IT leaders as causing brownouts. It means that you're proactively monitoring service quality rather than waiting for others to inform you when performance degradations get out of hand. By getting hold of independent performance data, organizations can enforce the relevant SLAs with their broadband provider and ensure they're getting the bandwidth they're paying for. Also consider running service activation tests and high-definition network testing after any upgrade or changes, to further minimize the chances of disruption down the line.

Any third-party technology suppliers serving your organization must also have access to the right tools to anticipate and tackle brownouts.

As we emerge from COVID-19, life for many of us will return to a pre-pandemic normal. But in many other ways it will be forever changed — 72% of office workers want to work remotely going forward, for example. This will require a closer focus on performance management, to ensure your IT and network services are ready for a new cloud- and digital-first era.

Sergio Bea is VP Global Enterprise and Channels at Accedian

The Latest

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 ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

Do You Know What Network Brownouts Are Costing You, and What You Need to Do About It?

Sergio Bea
Accedian

COVID-19 has changed a great deal this year about the way we live and work. Some things, like mass remote working and surging e-commerce sales, will long outlast the pandemic. But this creates a challenge. As businesses increasingly come to rely on high-speed, high performance networks, and the applications that run on top, what happens when brownouts occur?

The past year was all about survival. Now it's time to thrive. That means a renewed focus on network and application performance management to spur the next stage of growth, as we move out of the shadow of the pandemic.


Going Digital

Global business was already transforming digitally well before COVID-19 struck, although in some industries at a faster rate than others. Retail had become an increasingly competitive vertical, with brands under intense pressure to deliver seamless personalized experiences across multiple channels. In fact, the growing influence on online retail and direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker and Dollar Shave Club may have hastened the demise of many bricks and mortar stores including Payless ShoeSource, Gymboree and Charlotte Russe.

COVID-19 has accelerated the push to all things digital. Businesses that used to talk about digital strategy in "one- to three-year phases" must now scale-up in just days or weeks, according to McKinsey. A major part of this is about supporting the newly distributed workforce. In April, over half (51%) of Americans said they "always" work remotely.

Under Pressure

Unfortunately, network infrastructure has in many cases been unable to support these surging demands. A poll of over 1,000 IT decision makers in the US we conducted recently revealed that over 40% suffer network brownouts several times a week, while end user complaints about application performance soared by 60% due to performance degradations, excessive slowdowns and network congestion.

Nearly a third (30%) reported problems with SaaS applications like Office 365 and team collaboration tools, which have become a vital means to maintain employee productivity amidst mass remote working. Fast, uninterrupted access to such applications is not only essential, but also expected by home workers today. However, this doesn't tell the whole story. Respondents also highlighted problems with the performance of business-critical databases, streaming services that support webinars and online events, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), ERP and finance systems, and customer communication channels.

This is not only a barrier to employee but specifically to IT worker productivity. A fifth of organizations experience brownouts on a daily basis, and more than half spending an average of 2.5 hours resolving a single incident. For many, that means as much as 12.5 hours each week is wasted on network troubleshooting. This is also an issue that goes beyond staff productivity to the very heart of business performance. If you can't access and use critical databases, IT infrastructure in the public cloud and enterprise software, or interact with customers in a timely manner, everything starts to fall apart.

What's the Problem?

Nearly half (47%) of the organizations we polled blame network connectivity providers for these brownouts, as well as maintenance and upgrades (43%) and unexpected traffic increases (43%). A broader problem is that IT and network teams simply don't have visibility into performance. We found that over a quarter of network brownouts are not even discovered by IT or NetOps, but are instead found and reported by users or customers. That means problems aren't being addressed early on, before they can escalate. They have already become acute enough that end users are starting to notice.

That's bad news not only for staff productivity and satisfaction, but also your brand reputation. Both can have a serious knock-on effect on the bottom line. So where should IT and NetOps leaders turn?

Getting Proactive

Active monitoring can certainly help to resolve the top three issues highlighted by IT leaders as causing brownouts. It means that you're proactively monitoring service quality rather than waiting for others to inform you when performance degradations get out of hand. By getting hold of independent performance data, organizations can enforce the relevant SLAs with their broadband provider and ensure they're getting the bandwidth they're paying for. Also consider running service activation tests and high-definition network testing after any upgrade or changes, to further minimize the chances of disruption down the line.

Any third-party technology suppliers serving your organization must also have access to the right tools to anticipate and tackle brownouts.

As we emerge from COVID-19, life for many of us will return to a pre-pandemic normal. But in many other ways it will be forever changed — 72% of office workers want to work remotely going forward, for example. This will require a closer focus on performance management, to ensure your IT and network services are ready for a new cloud- and digital-first era.

Sergio Bea is VP Global Enterprise and Channels at Accedian

The Latest

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 ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...