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Network (In)Visibility Leads to IT Blame Game

Time for IT Managers to Take Back Control
Mike Heumann

Significant changes in the structure and use of IT, including such seismic trends as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), virtualization and cloud computing, have introduced new challenges to IT administrators and staff. Added layers of complexity require new skill sets and knowledge bases as well as tools to effectively run a modern enterprise network. This raises a few questions about how IT teams are coping with the changes.

Well, it appears that IT teams are struggling to gain visibility into what is causing IT problems, and are in many cases not implementing monitoring tools to help. In an Emulex survey of 547 US and European network and security operations (NetOps and SecOps) professionals conducted in the spring of 2014, 77% of respondents said that they had inaccurately reported the root cause of a network or security event to their executive team on at least one occasion. Additionally, 73% of surveyed IT staff said they currently have unresolved network events.

With more than half of US respondents (52%) confirming it costs their organization more than half a million dollars in revenue per hour when they have a network outage or performance degradation, you would assume that identifying unresolved network events would be a critical priority for IT organizations. This expectation is very much not the case – our survey revealed that 45% of organizations are still manually monitoring their networks.

With the flood of “unknown” devices resulting from BYOD (this can be hundreds or thousands of new devices daily), it would seem impossible for IT teams to derive the root cause of any network or security events if they do not have automated network surveillance tools. Startlingly, more than a quarter (26%) of European respondents said they have no plans to monitor the network for performance issues related to BYOD.

As a result of this lack of visibility, 79% of organizations have experienced network events that were attributed to the wrong IT group. This creates an “IT blame game” in which departments have to spend cycles proving their innocence, rather than getting to the root cause of network events and fixing them. If this trend continues, in tandem with increased virtualization and device proliferation, it will almost certainly lead to more outages and lost revenue.

It is also interesting to note that 83% of respondents said there has been an increase in the number of security events they have investigated in the past year. What will it take to make IT teams realize that without 100% visibility across their networks, the business is in jeopardy? The time is now for IT managers to take back control.

Mike Heumann is VP of Product Marketing and Alliances at Emulex.

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Network (In)Visibility Leads to IT Blame Game

Time for IT Managers to Take Back Control
Mike Heumann

Significant changes in the structure and use of IT, including such seismic trends as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), virtualization and cloud computing, have introduced new challenges to IT administrators and staff. Added layers of complexity require new skill sets and knowledge bases as well as tools to effectively run a modern enterprise network. This raises a few questions about how IT teams are coping with the changes.

Well, it appears that IT teams are struggling to gain visibility into what is causing IT problems, and are in many cases not implementing monitoring tools to help. In an Emulex survey of 547 US and European network and security operations (NetOps and SecOps) professionals conducted in the spring of 2014, 77% of respondents said that they had inaccurately reported the root cause of a network or security event to their executive team on at least one occasion. Additionally, 73% of surveyed IT staff said they currently have unresolved network events.

With more than half of US respondents (52%) confirming it costs their organization more than half a million dollars in revenue per hour when they have a network outage or performance degradation, you would assume that identifying unresolved network events would be a critical priority for IT organizations. This expectation is very much not the case – our survey revealed that 45% of organizations are still manually monitoring their networks.

With the flood of “unknown” devices resulting from BYOD (this can be hundreds or thousands of new devices daily), it would seem impossible for IT teams to derive the root cause of any network or security events if they do not have automated network surveillance tools. Startlingly, more than a quarter (26%) of European respondents said they have no plans to monitor the network for performance issues related to BYOD.

As a result of this lack of visibility, 79% of organizations have experienced network events that were attributed to the wrong IT group. This creates an “IT blame game” in which departments have to spend cycles proving their innocence, rather than getting to the root cause of network events and fixing them. If this trend continues, in tandem with increased virtualization and device proliferation, it will almost certainly lead to more outages and lost revenue.

It is also interesting to note that 83% of respondents said there has been an increase in the number of security events they have investigated in the past year. What will it take to make IT teams realize that without 100% visibility across their networks, the business is in jeopardy? The time is now for IT managers to take back control.

Mike Heumann is VP of Product Marketing and Alliances at Emulex.

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...