InfoVista released results of the new report “Meeting the Network Demands of Changing Generations” that was jointly conducted with BT, which highlights the challenges in managing the expectations of the new generation of workers.
“The ever-increasing Generation Y workforce is turning the workplace on its head – not only shaping culture and front-end operations, but also the supportive network infrastructures,” Sylvain Quartier, SVP products and markets strategy at InfoVista, says. “As this new workforce creates increasingly high demand for more applications and better network performance, IT departments must go the extra mile to ensure their talent is not disgruntled or unproductive. This could come to bear on businesses’ own revenue and customer satisfaction. Assuring this requires IT departments use highly visible and accurate, often round-the-clock application performance management solutions that could measure and predict service outages and degradations at any given time.”
The survey of nearly 300 senior information and communications technology (ICT) managers and decision makers across public and private enterprises reportedly reportedly shows that today’s workforce is unsatisfied with network performance overall. Ninety percent of respondents have received complaints related to application performance from a workforce increasingly dominated by Generation Y. Generation Y reportedly represents more than one in three workers in the United States.
Of those surveyed, 94 percent reportedly agreed that the corporate network has become more critical. Yet, only around half of organizations have insight into which applications could have a negative impact on the performance of the corporate network (51 percent) or have IT governance in place for application performance (57 percent), according to the report.
The study says it establishes a clear need for a governance approach to guarantee application performance and manage the user experience. In addition to implementing governance and tools to measure and predict performance (64 percent), many survey respondents also highlighted hybrid wide-area network (WAN) deployments (47 percent) and moving more applications to the cloud while outsourcing SLAs (45 percent) as the best ways to make the most of the corporate network, and simultaneously keep costs low.
“Continual capacity upgrades is not the answer. Instead, with a governance approach to managing the user experience, ICT has a view of individual applications on the network and can prioritize as necessary,” Ricardo Belmar, senior director, enterprise product marketing at InfoVista explains. “And, to truly take a proactive approach to guaranteeing application performance, businesses should also consider a hybrid WAN. By combining the enterprise WAN with high-speed Internet broadband, cloud-based traffic can be directly routed via the Internet. This ensures Generation Y employees and others remain productive because the applications they need to do their job are constantly available via the best network connection.”