* IT pros say security and disaster recovery, and app performance are key
We recently asked 342 IT professionals to evaluate 22 IT-related topics using two criteria – the importance of each topic to their organization and how much of a challenge it presented to their organization. In this week’s WAN newsletters, we will identify which topics received the most votes and will discuss what this means for the WAN.
Many of the topics of most importance to the survey respondents fit into a few broad categories such as security and disaster recovery, and application performance. The overall category that received the most votes was security and disaster recovery. Within this category, a topic of great importance to the respondents was providing secure remote access to employees and partners. The obvious impact on the WAN is that all of the traffic from the remote employees and partners transits the WAN. A somewhat less obvious impact is that the WAN organization has to manage the providers of the service, which can be a challenge particularly if the employees and partners are dispersed broadly around the world. However the survey respondents did not seem to be too concerned about this as they indicated that although it was important, implementing secure remote access to both employees and partners was not that much of a challenge.
The security-topic of most importance to the survey respondents was implementing a disaster recovery plan that enables the organization’s key processes to function after a disaster. This has a significant impact on the WAN because when a mid to large sized company implements a disaster recovery plan it typically uses the WAN to replicate its key databases either between production data centers or between a production data center and a warm or hot standby data center. Perhaps due to the significant impact that a disaster recovery plan has on the WAN, the survey respondents indicated that implementing a disaster recovery was not only important but also one of the most challenging issues they face.
Next time, we will discuss the some of the other topics that were important to the survey respondents. In the meantime, if you would like to participate in similar surveys and gain access to respondents-only information like this, check out the current surveys here and here.
