Global Survey Reveals Complexity, Change and Human Factors Are Key Causes of Today's Network Outages and Vulnerabilities

Most Network Professionals Still Rely on Manual Processes to Ensure Proper Network Operation


SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 15, 2016) - Veriflow, the network outage and vulnerability prevention company, today published its latest report, "Network Complexity, Change, and Human Factors Are Failing the Business." The global study, conducted by Dimensional Research, surveyed 315 network professionals about their experiences with network outages, vulnerabilities and compliance. Among the survey's findings:

  • 97 percent admit that human factors cause network outages
  • Two thirds state that monitoring solutions fail to predict most issues
  • 74 percent indicate network changes significantly impact the business several times a year or more
  • 4 out of 10 companies do not have network segmentation properly implemented

The full report can be downloaded here: http://veriflow.net/_files/veriflow-global-survey.pdf

Among the report's findings, there is almost universal agreement that human factors lead to network outages, and in many cases these outages are quite frequent. Participants report numerous outages occur every year associated with changes to the network and identify growing complexity of the network as a contributing factor. When an issue does occur, hours typically pass before the issue is reported, and once reported, it requires hours more to resolve.

Although human factors cause incidents, ironically the most common methods used to protect the network from such errors are also manual. Event and flow monitoring solutions are also commonly used. "Respondents, however, are saying their monitoring solutions fail to predict most incidents," said Brighten Godfrey, CTO at Veriflow. "There are persistent vulnerabilities as well, with widespread uncertainty about the network's compliance and segmentation. It's not surprising that network professionals are looking for solutions that provide more actionable intelligence about the network."

"Our goal with this survey was to capture how network professionals balanced increased network complexity and required changes with network uptime, availability, security and compliance requirements," said James Brear, president and CEO of Veriflow. "It's clear that many organizations settle for suboptimal network management solutions, thus costing them hours to report and resolve network issues. This problem highlights the importance of having a solution that predicts the impacts of network changes, identifies outages and vulnerabilities, and accelerates resolution time of network issues."

Manual Processes Cause Issues on Back End
As networks grow in complexity, the number of network outages tends to increase as well, according to more than half of respondents (59 percent). Considering the various methods to ensure proper network operation, 69 percent of respondents rely on manual processes, such as inspecting devices via the command line interface (CLI), inspecting configurations and performing manual traceroutes or pings, as one of their main solutions. Furthermore, the majority (two thirds) state that less than half of all network issues are predicted by monitoring. The popularity of manual checks and monitoring compared to predictive solutions indicates many possible inefficiencies in network management.

Compliance Requirements, Perception and Lack of Automation
Three quarters of survey respondents say their organization has network compliance requirements in place to ensure privacy and security of data and systems. Despite this majority, 80 percent lack full confidence that their network is always compliant, and 83 percent said that compliance reporting requires manual effort.

Predictive Solutions Highly Valued
Given continual issues with network outages and vulnerabilities, respondents agreed on a few key traits they would like to see in an ideal network solution:

  • 87 percent highly value a solution that predicts impending network outages
  • 85 percent highly value a solution that accelerates network issue resolution
  • 79 percent highly value continuous verification of compliance and automation of compliance reporting
  • 86 percent highly value the ability to pinpoint network segmentation and micro-segmentation vulnerabilities

Report Methodology
The report, which was conducted by Dimensional Research in October 2016, surveyed 315 network professionals at organizations with 1,000-plus employees to capture how they balanced increasing network complexity and required changes while maintaining uptime, availability, security and compliance requirements.

Demo
To request a demo of the Veriflow solution that automates many of these otherwise manual processes, please visit: http://info.veriflow.net/demo/

Social
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About Veriflow
Veriflow is the first networking company to use continuous network verification to eliminate network outages and vulnerabilities. The company was created by a team of computer science professors and Ph.D. students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is backed by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Menlo Ventures, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California. To learn more, visit veriflow.net and follow us on Twitter @veriflowsystems.

About Dimensional Research
Dimensional Research provides practical marketing research to help technology companies make smarter business decisions. Our researchers are experts in technology and understand how corporate IT organizations operate. Our qualitative research services deliver a clear understanding of customer and market dynamics. For more information, visit www.dimensionalresearch.com.

Contact Information:

Press Contact
Rick Popko
10Fold for Veriflow
(415) 800-5381