IT Pros Want Relief From Network Costs, Complexity, Talari Survey Says

In a new survey, IT professionals said a reliable network is important to the success of their businesses and they rely on the WAN for their most important tasks.

According to the survey, more than 40 percent of respondents said they had spent most of their IT budgets in 2015 on network solutions, with 31 percent saying they spent the most on cloud infrastructure. In addition, 38 percent plan to spend most of their IT budgets on the same thing this year.

Ninety percent of respondents said they will increase spending on their networks within the next five years. Almost half of the IT professionals said they will look to spend as much as 20 percent more on the network solutions.

More than 35 percent of respondents said network disruptions, which hurt the performance of critical applications, was at the top of their list of problems. Such disruptions can make it difficult for users to access the applications they need to do their jobs or to take advantage of all the features of the apps. Employee productivity, customer service and the overall brand can suffer.

More than 17 percent said that when large numbers of people try to use network resources, access is hindered and applications can slow to a crawl. This can be a particular problem if client-facing resources tied to the corporate WAN are affected.

Respondents noted a wide range of other network challenges, from monitoring, reporting and visualization (10.9 percent called it their top WAN problem), inadequate vendor support (10.4 percent), link load balancing (9.7 percent) and network complexity caused by devices that are difficult to install and maintain (7.2 percent).

According to 32 percent of respondents, increasing the reliability of the WANs is the biggest need in the WAN.

More than 46 percent of respondents currently using an SD-WAN solution are deploying a hybrid approach that includes both internet and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) connections.

Almost 23 percent of respondents said they are using only the internet in their SD-WAN deployments, while 20.8 percent are using only MPLS.

Almost three-quarters of respondents—72 percent—said they would be interested in tearing out and replacing MPLS for SD-WAN with broadband connectivity. Another 24 percent wouldn’t consider MPLS alternatives today, but would re-evaluate it in the next five years.

The two biggest desires for the respondents interested in SD-WAN was ensuring compatibility with other WAN technologies and efficiently allowing load sharing of traffic across multiple WANs.