Survey spotlights user app worries

Radware took advantage of two recent trade shows to ask attendees about trends in Web application performance going into the new year. At Radware InfoSecurity and Interop New York Radware was able to poll more than 60 network managers about their IP networks and the applications running on them.

Among the respondents, more than 42% have employees in regional or remote offices that require access to information and applications residing in the corporate data center. Some 27% said they have many employees at remote offices that depend upon local servers to deliver application access and data. And more than one-third reported that most employees work from and depend upon the headquarters location, which also houses the corporate data center.

Specifically, the application acceleration vendor wanted to learn about IT managers tops concerns when it comes to application delivery. According to the results, some 32% of respondents have between 81% and 100% of their critical applications depending on their IP network either because they are network or Web-enabled. Another 22% said between 61% and 80% of their applications do, and more than one-fifth reported that between 41% and 60% of their applications depend on the IP network.

Major challenges about half of the respondents reported going forward was “inefficient use of network resources such as servers, firewalls, VPNs and more,” according to Radware. Other top concerns, for about 44%, included slow user response time from applications and for 39%, bandwidth issues. More issues making the list of concerns for application delivery were “application-level security exploits” for some 32%, downtime for more than 20% and denial-of-service  volume traffic attacks for 10%.

Still about 65% said they feel their current investments in technology are sufficient to address their concerns, while the other one-third did not. As far as looking ahead to 2006, server overload topped the list of future issues, with more than 45% citing it as the “greatest obstacle to ensuring optimal application delivery.” Transaction failures came in second with more than 40% noting that as a hurdle, and 39% said malicious hacker activity was a top concern for 2006. Bots and worms worry about 27% while denial-of-service attacks still nag at about 17% of respondents.