Lack of network history delays resolution of security issues

Endace released the findings from its survey that highlight the operational challenges being faced by IT teams as they come to terms with the latest high-speed, network-centric technologies such as cloud, unified communications and VDI.

Highlights from the survey, which is based on more than 100 interviews with senior network IT professionals from organizations with 5,000 to 200,000 employees, include the following disturbing facts about the current state of operational effectiveness:

• 23 percent of organizations experience serious service-affecting problems on a daily basis
• An additional 25 percent admit to experiencing serious network issues each month
• Organizations’ hardest network problems can take up to 30 days or more to rectify, making MAX-TTR (maximum time-to-resolution) an expensive issue for large, resource-constrained organizations
• Organizations can have up to 250 performance-related trouble tickets open at any given time, with half of respondents reporting that at least 50 percent of their trouble tickets stay open for more than 24 hours
• Nearly 40 percent of respondents noted that they do not know which applications are in use on their network, while 53 percent admit that employees use applications that violate IT policies
• Despite an abundance of monitoring tools, nearly 30 percent of organizations do not have a clear understanding of bandwidth utilization, which makes troubleshooting end-user issues extremely challenging.

Large organizations have estimated that the cost of network downtime ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per hour. For obvious reasons, minimizing Time-to-Resolution on all types of service-affecting issues has become a top priority for organizations, putting IT operational teams squarely in the spotlight.

Comments from survey respondents confirmed that processes for diagnosing and remediating difficult issues are often ad-hoc.

“Most IT shops have invested heavily in detection technologies that alert on issues and correlation technologies that attempt to filter and triage the most important issues. But what we’ve learned from this study is that many shops still face long resolution times far too often,” said Spencer Greene, senior vice president of marketing and product management at Endace. “As a result of this learning, we’re working with organizations to apply network history to the problem of MAX-TTR.”