Seventy-four percent of respondents indicated their chief concern about cloud migration was ensuring corporate data security.
IT teams will face
significant monitoring challenges from multiple forms of cloud computing, as
well as substantially increased bandwidth demands, Network Instruments reported in its "Fifth Annual State of the Network Global Study."
The research showed that 60
percent of those polled anticipate that half their apps will run in the cloud
within 12 months, and 70 percent will implement video conferencing within a
year. A quarter of the respondents expect video will consume half of all
bandwidth in 12 months. Bandwidth issues remain a concern, with 33 percent
expecting bandwidth consumption to increase by more than 50 percent in next two
years.
While IT teams embrace
cloud services and video conferencing as a way to increase cost savings and
business flexibility, these technologies introduce new components and
environments which make ensuring positive end-user experience all the more
challenging, said Brad Reinboldt, senior product manager of Network Instruments, a
specialist in network and application performance monitoring.
The reported lack of monitoring tools, quality metrics and visibility creates
serious obstacles that prevent IT from effectively managing performance and
jeopardizes costly technology investments.
While the number of
organizations embracing cloud (60 percent) remains steady compared with last
years study results, the number of implementations per organization is
growing. Most notable were software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service
(IaaS) and private cloud deploymentswhich grew by 10 percent over the last
year. On average, respondents expected one-third of their applications to be
running in the cloud within 12 months.
Seventy-four percent of
respondents indicated their chief concern about cloud migration was ensuring
corporate data security. The number is nearly double that of last year, and
that may be the primary reason for slowing cloud adoption by new organizations,
Reinboldt said. Other top concerns included lack of accurate end-user
experience with monitoring and the bandwidth impact of cloud services. Although
challenging from a monitoring and visibility perspective, one-third of
organizations indicated application availability increased as a result of cloud
migration.
The survey also suggested
that enterprise video conferencing is now mainstream. Video conferencing has
been implemented by 55 percent of survey respondents, with an expected 70
percent within a year. Nearly two-thirds of these organizations have
implemented multiple deployments throughout their organization. These include
standard conference rooms (75 percent), desktop PCs (63 percent) and
telepresence systems (30 percent).
While video is clearly being
embraced, several cited challenges that could hinder wider adoption. Inadequate
user knowledge and training was viewed as the largest concern in ensuring a
positive video conference experience (53 percent). This was followed by
difficulties allocating and monitoring bandwidth (47 percent) and a lack of
tools to manage video performance (47 percent).
Further compounding these
issues are the lack of standardized metrics to monitor video quality. Network
professionals typically relied on a mix of metrics to assess quality, including
latency (76 percent), packet loss (69 percent) and jitter (60 percent). Less
than one in five use Video MOS, a metric specifically designed to determine
video quality.
By the beginning of 2013,
nearly one-quarter of respondents expect video to consume more than half their
bandwidth. The survey suggested that as applications become more complex and
tiered, the ability to resolve service delivery issues grows. Eighty-three
percent of respondents said the largest application troubleshooting challenge
was identifying the problem source. Additionally, more than two-thirds of
respondents predicted network traffic demands would increase by 25 percent to
50 percent within two years.
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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