According to a recent survey of networking personnel from midsized enterprises and education institutions, 65% of respondents expressed that current WAN optimization solutions are not sufficient to handle the growing complexity presented by networks which increasingly span multiple devices, geographies and cloud infrastructures.
Michael Sharma, CEO for Exinda Networks, noted that his company continues to hear from network managers that it's getting harder to meet user experience SLAs. As more applications, devices, users, locations and activities are flooding the network, Exinda customers have identified five key business problems that their WAN solution must now solve.
Survey results identified five key challenges a WAN Solution must address to meet the demands of the modern network landscape. Respondents reported experiencing the following challenges:
· Ensuring resources for critical applications (69%)
· Enforcing appropriate network use (57%)
· Reducing WAN circuit speed (49%)
· Troubleshooting networking problems (34%)
· Supporting critical IT projects (20%)
The need to address these issues is driving network and IT managers to look beyond conventional WAN solutions which are traditionally delivered as independent tools for traffic acceleration and bandwidth management.
The challenge for network managers today is that traditional WAN solutions tend to be narrowly focused on solving singular problems without regard for the bigger picture - an issue that led nearly 68% of respondents to state that current solutions would soon no longer meet their needs. These changing dynamics within the enterprise network have created the need for a more orchestrated approach to critical IT priorities.
Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, added, "A change in approach is needed to proactively manage today’s network. As a result of increased user and application complexity, solving our most pressing IT problems is becoming a bigger challenge. To pragmatically solve network management issues, IT needs to think beyond traditional WAN solution approaches, which historically have focused on traffic acceleration. Network managers must instead intelligently coordinate all aspects of their WAN environment."
Brendan Reid is VP of Marketing, Exinda Networks.
