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The State of the Network is … In the Clouds. Guess Where Your Applications Are?

Steve Brown

We've come a long way from the days when all enterprise applications were hosted on-premise in the internal data center. The enterprise network is being propelled further and further away from the data center … and into the cloud. Viavi's ninth annual State of the Network global study provides ample evidence of this and also shows how incredibly rapidly this is happening.

The State of the Network study is conducted each year to highlight network trends and examine the challenges that IT teams are facing. In fact, the seismic shifts occurring in the enterprise network are presenting a number of interesting challenges for Application Performance Management (APM), both for today and the near future.

Based on insight gathered from CIOs, IT directors, analysts and network engineers around the world, the adoption of next-generation infrastructure technologies is accelerating at an ever faster pace. Fifty-four percent of State of the Network study respondents expect bandwidth requirements to grow by half in 2016, and 48 percent expect them to double by the end of 2017. As a result, enterprises are significantly increasing their deployment of 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100 GbE), public and private cloud, and software-defined networking (SDN).

Moving to the Cloud

The expected growth in bandwidth demand is clearly a factor behind the transition to the cloud, but it's not the only driving force. Enterprise networks also are being held to a higher standard of availability and performance than ever before, and the cloud enables improved service availability, reliability and network resource provisioning. And, yet, despite the strategic motivations for cloud-based architecture, it is the almighty dollar that is providing the biggest push into the cloud. 62 percent of study respondents were seeking lower operating expenses with a cloud infrastructure and 53 percent were looking to reduce capital expenses.

This year's study found that 66 percent of respondents have turned to public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, Google's Cloud Platform and Microsoft's Azure, and 54 percent have deployed private cloud platforms. In fact, nearly 90 percent of study respondents have at least one application in the cloud, and 28 percent already host the majority of their applications there.

By 2017, more than four out of five will be using public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructure, and more than half expect to have the majority of their applications in the cloud. A particularly interesting finding is that more than half of all respondents are using two or more public cloud vendors, potentially creating unique challenges for application visibility and management.

Additionally, two out of three respondents have already deployed some facet of SDN as well. This was surprising, given that in the 2015 study, SDN adoption was projected to be just 51 percent by the end of 2016, with slightly less than half of respondents saying they had no plans at all.

Cloud Forecast: Reduced Visibility

As cloud and hybrid cloud networking becomes more commonplace, applications can now span across environments. Today's IT professionals are being challenged to manage workloads and provision interconnections between on-premises, private cloud and even multiple third-party cloud vendors.

Among the challenges cited in the 2016 State of the Network study, the top issues related to application monitoring in the cloud are reduced visibility and control, tracking end user experience, and SLA enforcement. Almost nine in 10 respondents cite each of these issues as being very or somewhat challenging.

In fact, for the first time in the study's nine-year history, the top challenge in application monitoring is no longer "isolating the problem to the network, system or application." Instead, 60 percent defined the primary issue as "tracking application bugs and patches."

For enterprises deploying or operating hybrid clouds, the move outside the internal data center presents significant risk of losing performance monitoring capabilities of resources spread across physical, virtual and cloud hosting environments. When it comes to comprehensive monitoring of an increasingly hybrid network environment, it's important for IT teams to work closely with application performance management vendors to keep a close eye on enterprise resources as they navigate this uncharted territory.


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The State of the Network is … In the Clouds. Guess Where Your Applications Are?

Steve Brown

We've come a long way from the days when all enterprise applications were hosted on-premise in the internal data center. The enterprise network is being propelled further and further away from the data center … and into the cloud. Viavi's ninth annual State of the Network global study provides ample evidence of this and also shows how incredibly rapidly this is happening.

The State of the Network study is conducted each year to highlight network trends and examine the challenges that IT teams are facing. In fact, the seismic shifts occurring in the enterprise network are presenting a number of interesting challenges for Application Performance Management (APM), both for today and the near future.

Based on insight gathered from CIOs, IT directors, analysts and network engineers around the world, the adoption of next-generation infrastructure technologies is accelerating at an ever faster pace. Fifty-four percent of State of the Network study respondents expect bandwidth requirements to grow by half in 2016, and 48 percent expect them to double by the end of 2017. As a result, enterprises are significantly increasing their deployment of 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100 GbE), public and private cloud, and software-defined networking (SDN).

Moving to the Cloud

The expected growth in bandwidth demand is clearly a factor behind the transition to the cloud, but it's not the only driving force. Enterprise networks also are being held to a higher standard of availability and performance than ever before, and the cloud enables improved service availability, reliability and network resource provisioning. And, yet, despite the strategic motivations for cloud-based architecture, it is the almighty dollar that is providing the biggest push into the cloud. 62 percent of study respondents were seeking lower operating expenses with a cloud infrastructure and 53 percent were looking to reduce capital expenses.

This year's study found that 66 percent of respondents have turned to public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, Google's Cloud Platform and Microsoft's Azure, and 54 percent have deployed private cloud platforms. In fact, nearly 90 percent of study respondents have at least one application in the cloud, and 28 percent already host the majority of their applications there.

By 2017, more than four out of five will be using public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructure, and more than half expect to have the majority of their applications in the cloud. A particularly interesting finding is that more than half of all respondents are using two or more public cloud vendors, potentially creating unique challenges for application visibility and management.

Additionally, two out of three respondents have already deployed some facet of SDN as well. This was surprising, given that in the 2015 study, SDN adoption was projected to be just 51 percent by the end of 2016, with slightly less than half of respondents saying they had no plans at all.

Cloud Forecast: Reduced Visibility

As cloud and hybrid cloud networking becomes more commonplace, applications can now span across environments. Today's IT professionals are being challenged to manage workloads and provision interconnections between on-premises, private cloud and even multiple third-party cloud vendors.

Among the challenges cited in the 2016 State of the Network study, the top issues related to application monitoring in the cloud are reduced visibility and control, tracking end user experience, and SLA enforcement. Almost nine in 10 respondents cite each of these issues as being very or somewhat challenging.

In fact, for the first time in the study's nine-year history, the top challenge in application monitoring is no longer "isolating the problem to the network, system or application." Instead, 60 percent defined the primary issue as "tracking application bugs and patches."

For enterprises deploying or operating hybrid clouds, the move outside the internal data center presents significant risk of losing performance monitoring capabilities of resources spread across physical, virtual and cloud hosting environments. When it comes to comprehensive monitoring of an increasingly hybrid network environment, it's important for IT teams to work closely with application performance management vendors to keep a close eye on enterprise resources as they navigate this uncharted territory.


APM

Hot Topics

The Latest

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 ...

Cloud computing has transformed how we build and scale software, but it has also quietly introduced one of the most persistent challenges in modern IT: cost visibility and control ... So why, after more than a decade of cloud adoption, are cloud costs still spiraling out of control? The answer lies not in tooling but in culture ...

CEOs are committed to advancing AI solutions across their organization even as they face challenges from accelerating technology adoption, according to the IBM CEO Study. The survey revealed that executive respondents expect the growth rate of AI investments to more than double in the next two years, and 61% confirm they are actively adopting AI agents today and preparing to implement them at scale ...

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A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

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The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

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 ...