A Vanson Bourne Omnibus survey of 100 IT managers in large UK enterprises revealed the trends that will affect the WAN over the next few years as the performance of the WAN, the foundation of the globally connected enterprise, comes increasingly under threat as networks choke with data.


Key findings include:

• 46% of IT managers are facing application performance issues due to data transfer bottlenecks and unpredictability on the WAN
• On the growth of applications, desktop virtualisation (VDI) and Microsoft Office 365 adoption are both set to double in the next 12 months
• More prevalent technologies such as corporate video, Microsoft Exchange and ERP projects are also set to grow by 50% in the next 12 months
• 49% of IT managers are turning to costly bandwidth upgrades over the next year to try and deal with the growth of applications and improve application performance over the WAN
• 40% of IT managers have already admitted that cost savings from consolidation initiatives are wiped out by network upgrade costs.

Etienne Greeff, Managing Director at SecureData, commenteed: "Rather than embarking on costly bandwidth upgrades, which in isolation are unlikely to deliver the application performance improvement they are seeking, IT managers should be looking to implement solutions such as WAN optimisation that will not only consolidate infrastructure projects, but will rapidly increase the efficiency of data transfer”.

Etienne continued: “Organisations must carefully evaluate the impact that new application and consolidation projects will have on the network. ROI analysis needs to be conducted before embarking on expensive bandwidth upgrade projects, which will often do nothing to improve application response times or speed file transfers over a wide area network. Money is better spent understanding what traffic is traversing wide area links so that only business critical traffic is accelerated and prioritised. Once this is done one knows that bandwidth upgrades will provide demonstrable business benefit”.