Back when I used to work in a product testing lab, one of my favorite things to do was to fire up a piece of network testing hardware and put a network under extreme traffic conditions. I always felt a little like Jack Bauer interrogating some bad guy. “Listen up network, you can give me your information the easy way or the hard way, but the hard way is going to hurt a lot more.”

Of course, outside of the gleeful fun of stress testing a network, testing products like these also provide a lot of value, making it possible to find out how a network will behave under a wide variety of conditions, glean important insight from those tests and ensure that a network is ready to handle any conditions the real-world throws at it.

However, for a long time network testing hardware was really expensive, especially for something that is often only used occasionally. And the complexity of running tests as well as understanding and taking action from results has usually required high levels of expertise and experience in network testing.

Luckily, things look to be changing. In the new report Breaking Down Network Testing Barriers, we look at new testing technologies that lower the cost and complexity barriers to performing network testing. And we analyze how businesses that do network testing can achieve high levels of network uptime and performance.

Jim Rapoza is Senior Research Analyst at Aberdeen Group.

Related Links:

Aberdeen IT Infrastructure Practice

Aberdeen Report: Breaking Down Network Testing Barriers