Network Downtime, IoT Giving IT Decision-Makers Fits

By TC Doyle

Nine out of 10 senior-level IT decision makers harbor doubts about their networks’ robustness and scalability.

That’s according to a new survey completed by U.K. market researcher Vanson Bourne on behalf of Brocade Communications Systems Inc.

After polling more than 400 top IT personnel in the U.K. and the United States, Vanson Bourne found that a “staggering 92 percent…feel that their infrastructure is not agile enough to deliver robust and scalable services to stakeholders or support next-generation applications.”

On top of that, three-quarters (75%) of people surveyed said they felt this way despite investing in their networks within the past three years.

Why the unease? Brocade says Vanson Bourne pins it down to the number of times users have had to take remedial action to restart their networks. There also are lingering doubts over networks’ ability to support new applications and devices. This is a huge concern as the Internet of Things takes off.

The big winner from findings like this is, of course, software-defined networking (SDN), on which Brocade has spent a princely sum. Vanson Bourne found that more than half of survey respondents “are either actively evaluating SDN technologies or plan to do so in the next 12 months.”

What’s more, “users believe that a software-based approach will deliver improved uptime and availability, better access to real-time information and increased productivity, so they are looking to re-engineer their environments to help them on the journey to SDN,” Vanson Bourne wrote for Brocade.

The findings no doubt are a shot across the bow to market leader Cisco, which Brocade hopes to overtake as SND becomes more popular. In addition to making bold statements about its OpenFlow technology, Brocade has made serious moves to acquire world-class networking talent with a keen interest in SDN from both Cisco and Juniper.

Meantime, Vanson Bourne further found that “65 percent of respondents are actively using (or evaluating in the next year) Ethernet fabric architectures in a bid to manage their current cost, complexity and reliability challenges while building the robust physical infrastructure needed for SDN.”

Indeed, the market researcher continues to make headlines for its clients. In February, Vanson Bourne found, on Dell’s behalf, that IT pros plan to significantly increase security spending as cloud BYOD takes over the workplace. Then, in March, Vanson Bourne, writing for CA, said that tech spending outside of the IT department is “growing rapidly,” reshaping how technology is purchased, rolled out and used.