Emulex Study Shows That Network Visibility Can Help Avoid the IT Blame Game

Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX), a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, announced the results of a study of 547 U.S. and European-based network and security operations (NetOps and SecOps) professionals, which found that 45% of IT staffs monitor network and application performance manually, instead of implementing proven network monitoring tools. The study, which was conducted during the spring of 2014, also found that 77% of respondents have reported the root cause of a network or security event to their executive team that turned out to be incorrect. Overall, 73% of surveyed IT staff said they currently have unresolved network events.

Read the full executive summary report here. Download the infographic here. Other key findings from the survey:

Attribution Often Incorrect

– 79% of the surveyed organizations have experienced network events that were attributed to the wrong IT group.
– 87% of respondents said that, at least once, they had to report the root cause of a network or security issue to their management but found that they didn’t have the information required to be 100% accurate in their assessment.
– More than one-third (39%) said this has happened at least a few times.

Security Events on the Rise

-83% of respondents said there has been an increase in the number of security events they have investigated in the past year.
– 81% of SecOps respondents indicated that their organization has experienced a network security breach.
– 27% of breaches were discovered without the use of alerting tools, through manual searches and user reporting.

Growing Mobility Demands

– 84% of respondents said their organization has implemented a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiative
– 26% of European respondents said they have no plans to monitor the network for performance issues related to BYOD. When combined with the fact that 45% of organizations are manually monitoring the performance of their networks, the growing amount of mobile device-generated traffic is on pace to overwhelm enterprise networks.

Downtime Hugely Impactful

– 70% of NetOps respondents indicated that they have had a critical network event that took at least one full business day to diagnose.
– More than half of U.S. respondents (52%) said it costs their organization more than half a million dollars in revenue per hour when they have a network outage or performance degradation.
 
Executive Commentary

“IT is facing new challenges related to the growing use of software-defined networking, virtualization and higher performing networks, as well as increasingly more sophisticated attacks on company IT assets,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing, Emulex. “The clear message from this survey is that one of the best tools for SecOps and NetOps professionals to have at their disposal is 100 percent network visibility that is tied to their detection management systems. It’s the combination of proactive management and the ability to do forensic analysis that will give these IT professionals the right tools to maximize application delivery, protect their corporate assets and avoid the IT blame game.”

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About Emulex

Emulex, a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, provides hardware and software solutions for global networks that support enterprise, cloud, government and telecommunications. Emulex’s products enable unrivaled end-to-end application visibility, optimization and acceleration. The Company’s I/O connectivity offerings, including its line of ultra high-performance Ethernet and Fibre Channel-based connectivity products, have been designed into server and storage solutions from leading OEMs, including Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, IBM, NetApp and Oracle, and can be found in the data centers of nearly all of the Fortune 1000. Emulex’s monitoring and management solutions, including its portfolio of network visibility and recording products, provide organizations with complete network performance management at speeds up to 100Gb Ethernet. Emulex is headquartered in Costa Mesa, Calif., and has offices and research facilities in North America, Asia and Europe. For more information about Emulex (NYSE:ELX) please visit http://www.Emulex.com.