Bandwidth alone will not be sufficient to meet the needs of application performance on wide area networks (WAN) for enterprise in the near future. According to a new report entitled "The Big Pipe Dream – Why more bandwidth won’t save your network" commissioned by independent IT security service provider SecureData, WAN optimisation and other measures will be necessary to meet the future needs of enterprise as "networks choke with data".
Some of the main findings of the report were that 46% of IT managers are facing application performance issues due to data transfer bottlenecks and unpredictability on the WAN. On the growth of applications, desktop virtualisation (VDI) and Microsoft Office 365 adoption are both set to double in the next 12 months, putting further pressure on WANs. More prevalent technologies such as corporate video, Microsoft Exchange and ERP projects are also set to grow by 50% in the next 12 months.
Some 49% of IT managers are turning to costly bandwidth upgrades over the next year to try and deal with the growth of applications and improve application performance over the WAN, while 40% admitted that cost savings from consolidation initiatives are wiped out by network upgrade costs.
"Rather than embarking on costly bandwidth upgrades," said Etienne Greeff, managing director, SecureData, "which in isolation are unlikely to deliver the application performance improvement they are seeking, IT managers should be looking to implement solutions such as WAN optimisation that will not only consolidate infrastructure projects, but will rapidly increase the efficiency of data transfer".
"Organisations must carefully evaluate the impact that new application and consolidation projects will have on the network. ROI analysis needs to be conducted before embarking on expensive bandwidth upgrade projects, which will often do nothing to improve application response times or speed file transfers over a wide area network. Money is better spent understanding what traffic is traversing wide area links so that only business critical traffic is accelerated and prioritised. Once this is done one knows that bandwidth upgrades will provide demonstrable business benefit".
The survey was carried out among 100 IT managers in large enterprises (more than 1,000 employees) across the financial services, manufacturing, retail, distribution/transport and commercial sectors.
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