Work from home and remote access employees are a top network operations (NetOps) and security operations (SecOps) challenge. That’s as the number of these employees soars, according to results of a global network study Viavi Solutions released Wednesday.

The 13^th annual State of the Network Global Study finds that IT is living in an age of dynamic disruption. This disruption is twofold; first, the transition to remote employee support is at an all-time high due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, it’s making emerging technologies go mainstream.

The surge in remote users is challenging NetOps and SecOps. And, 58% of them want greater visibility — along with supporting resources.

Viavi Solutions’ Charles Thompson

“As remote working becomes the new norm, IT teams are challenged to find and adapt technologies, such as flow-based reporting to manage bandwidth consumption, VPN oversubscription and troubleshooting applications. To guarantee the best performance and reduce cybersecurity threats, increasing network visibility is now a must for all businesses,” said Charles Thompson, senior director, enterprise and cloud at Viavi Solutions, the provider of network test, monitoring and assurance products. “By empowering NetOps, as well as application and security teams with network visibility, IT can mitigate the impact of disruptive migrations, incidents and new technologies like SD-WAN to achieve consistent operational excellence. This year’s State of the Network study clearly demonstrates an increasing awareness of this fact among all IT stakeholders.”

Key Findings

Here are the six key findings from the Network Global Study.

The results come from polling more than 400 respondents – including network engineers, IT directors, security engineers and CIOs – worldwide. In addition to geographic diversity, the study population was evenly distributed among networks and business verticals of different sizes. Study questions were designed based on a survey of network professionals, according to Viavi.