Application performance visibility seen as key to boosting business processes and user experience

Researchers also found that an even higher proportion of senior IT professionals – 86% – is  likely to start designing business services from the user experience outwards over the next two years. 

These findings from the study conducted by Sapio Research show the constant pressure that enterprise IT teams are under to ensure a better corporate IT experience for each individual employee - as well as delivering better performance from global-level business-critical applications running across complex cloud and hybrid network environments.

Sapio Research questioned 200 senior IT and networking managers (100 in the US and 100 in the UK) at companies with worldwide operations, with revenues ranging from £100 million ($127 million) to £30 billion ($38 billion).  

With advances in cloud and global connectivity, network re-design using SD-WAN and the rise of more flexible business models, network monitoring remains an essential but troublesome task for IT teams, creating a series of ongoing IT resourcing and finance pressures.  

The survey found that, on average, network monitoring now absorbs 36% of corporate IT budgets while a majority (52%) of respondents says that deploying networking infrastructure and monitoring solutions is time-consuming. Almost as many interviewees (49%) feel that managing networking infrastructure and monitoring solutions is costly. 

Organising more sophisticated network monitoring creates continual funding dilemmas: most IT teams are most likely to fund network / application visibility tools using CAPEX (56%), while almost as many (50%) will submit a separate business case, and 44% decide to use the OPEX budget.

When asked what specific reasons drive the use of new network monitoring tools, adopting cloud was the most popular (cited by 46% of interviewees), followed by gaining flexibility in network infrastructure and performance (39%), particular deployment challenges within network infrastructure and performance (37%) and gaining visibility of critical applications (36%).

Marc Sollars, CTO at Teneo, said: “Getting visibility of network infrastructures and individual  applications’ performance is essential because everyone expects so much more from office IT - whether it is the board, IT-savvy Millennial recruits, or personnel working remotely on the other side of the world. 

“Faced with this sort of pressure, networking teams are investing in new types of monitoring tools and services to gain this new level of insight and help improve UX, even though network upkeep already takes a hefty chunk of the IT budget. It’s no surprise that networking teams face a continual dilemma of how to deliver this ‘next level’ visibility – do they make a separate business case from capital expenditure or can they squeeze it out of OPEX?”