Network Instruments has just released its 2010 State of the Network Global Study. Find out what’s important to 265 other IT professionals in network management roles, and see how your organization compares.
Network Instruments just published its fourth annual State of the Network Global Study in which it surveyed more than 260 IT professionals, a majority of which say they are implementing new technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization, but are lacking appropriate tools to manage them.
The study also shows that many IT organizations are spending more time managing and troubleshooting performance related issues in these environments, a quandary for organizations looking to reap the promised benefits of these technologies. According to Brad Reinboldt, senior product manager with Network Instruments, “If IT can’t address these problems, they risk not only degrading application performance but threatening overall business productivity.”
A whopping 54% of the responding organizations have embraced some flavor of cloud computing. One-third utilize some form of Software as a Service (SaaS), like SalesForce.com; a fourth have implemented private clouds; and a smaller percentage, just 13%, rely on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.
The respondents indicate they have achieved benefits right out of the gate with their cloud implementations, including lower infrastructure costs, more IT flexibility and increased application availability. That being said, there are several downsides.
One of the main challenges the cloud adopters cited is monitoring and management of the cloud. According to Reinboldt, “they are having issues with understanding what is really going on in the cloud, what is going on with these resources and how the end users are experiencing those services provided through the cloud.”
In a perfect world, IT organizations would have the same level of visibility and control over both internal and cloud processes. “With SaaS implementations, organizations have the mentality that they are shifting away from their core internal processes and moving more to their Internet connection,” says Reinboldt. “But there’s a lot of concern about what you can do if those services go down. It’s not like offerings such as SalesForce.com provide organizations with a really good alternative recourse in their SLA should the service go down.”
The survey also shows that nearly 80% of the respondents have done some type of infrastructure virtualization, representing a 5% increase over the 2009 survey results. While early adopters initially focused on server virtualization, respondents now have the confidence to move to storage and desktop virtualization. More than 40% of the respondents have started to virtualize desktops.
The majority of virtualization implementers report having attained cost reductions in the areas of energy and infrastructure as well as improved application availability. One interesting point of note is that these gains did not necessarily lead to an improved user experience, as the majority of network professionals stated the experience remained the same.
Despite virtualization’s benefits, over one-third of respondents report their ability to troubleshoot issues worsened after virtualizing data center resources, and over half believe they lack the tools and visibility to manage it. Steve Brown, product marketing manager at Network Instruments, says, “It’s clear that organizations are realizing the expected benefits, but the people that manage, monitor, and make sure the services are being delivered are sending a message to product vendors: this is an area that must be strengthened.”
As with cloud computing, virtualization is another area where technology gets ahead of itself by not having the tools needed to best manage and monitor it. Thirty percent of the survey takers say they have no tools in place to manage these resources and 20% say this causes an increase in resources to trouble shoot problems. Participants complain of the lack of visibility into what is really going on within the hypervisor.
Reinboldt believes, “With new technologies it’s about control, or the lack of it.” Prior to adopting the cloud and virtualization technologies, IT professionals had in place tools to provide insight and control over the processes on the internal network. Now with the shift to both virtualization and cloud computing, these professionals have less visibility and control into processes.
Linda Musthaler and Brian Musthaler are co-founders and the principal analysts of Essential Solutions Corp. You can write to Linda at mailto:LMusthaler@essential-iws.com and to Brian at bmusthaler@essential-iws.com.
About Essential Solutions Corp: Essential Solutions (http://www.essential-iws.com) researches the practical value of information technology, and how it can make individual workers and entire organizations more productive. Essential Solutions offers consulting services to computer industry and corporate clients to help define and fulfill the potential of IT.
