A new study conducted by Ipanema Technologies and Easynet found that corporate networks across Europe are experiencing significant performance problems due to blind spots around applications.

The study, Killer Apps 2012, found that performance problems are highly prevalent across networks, with 74% citing enterprise critical applications such as line of business, ERP or CRM, and video-based applications being those most at risk.

In addition, the results unearthed a worrying trend on how such problems are discovered, with user complaints the second most common source of monitoring issues across networks.

Survey highlights include ...

Application performance issues are on the rise across Europe:

- 82% of respondents report speed and responsiveness problems in the past 12 months

- Enterprise, line of business, voice and collaboration applications were cited by 65% of respondents as being the most likely to suffer performance problems

- 43% of companies highlighted that these issues are becoming ‘more frequent’

A lack of visibility when it comes to networked applications:

- 69% do not have visibility of the bandwidth requirements each network application requires

- 55% of respondents rely on the ‘final line of defense’, namely user complaints, as their primary performance metric

- Nearly one in three respondents do not know the number of apps running on their corporate network

In many organizations the network is ‘over provisioned’ suggesting inefficient application of bandwidth:

- 72% of respondents said the network is only used to its full data transmission capacity occasionally or very infrequently

- The vast majority of companies (86%) report increasing bandwidth requirements

Thierry Grenot, CTO at Ipanema Technologies said: “Enterprises need to be more agile in order to reach the business outcomes they expect from strategic IT transformations, such as cloud computing and Unified Communications deployments. The report findings strongly suggest that businesses could benefit from understanding their networks more thoroughly in order to target bandwidth to those applications the business relies on, reducing investment in unnecessary capacity.”

He continued: “Right now there is a ‘perfect storm’ emerging as companies face an explosion of bandwidth requirements from less critical applications, coupled with the need to reduce expenditure. Today’s CIOs require a rock solid yet flexible network which is aligned to the priorities of the organization. That necessitates a more sophisticated approach to networking which includes high levels of visibility and control in order to solve the delivery challenges posed by the complexity of cloud applications.”