State of the Network Global Study Forecasts Cloudy Days Ahead

What challenges lay ahead for networks in 2012? According to the recently released, 2012 State of the Network Global Study, it’s more cloud adoption and video. The study was authored by network management vendor, Network Instruments.

According to the study, 60 percent of organizations expect that half their applications will run in the cloud inside of the next 12 months. While cloud adoption is growing, so too is the top concern about the cloud, namely security. Almost three out of four of the study’s respondents identified security for corporate data, as their top cloud deployment concern.

“The increase in concern about cloud security has increased dramatically,” Brad Reinboldt, product marketing manager at Network Instruments told InternetNews.com. “Given the many headlines regarding security breaches in the cloud and with internally hosted infrastructure it is understandable.”

Reinboldt noted that Network Instrument hopes to better quantify in next year’s survey, if the concern about cloud security is based on specific intrusions or if it is simply just a matter of perception.

Challenges in monitoring the end-user experience in the cloud were cited by 37 percent of respondents as being a cloud deployment issue, while 33 percent were concerned about compliance issues.

Another cloud deployment challenge cited by 32 percent of respondents is the impact of network bandwidth. Overall, network bandwidth requirements are expected to continue to grow in 2012. Approximately 70 percent of respondents expect the next 12 months to bring network traffic gains of between 25 percent and 50 percent.

One item that network admins apparently aren’t too concerned about right now however is IPv6. The global free pool of available IPv4 address space was exhausted in 2011, though to date adoption of IPv6 in enterprises has been slow. Only five percent of the Network Instruments survey respondents identified IPv6 as an emerging technology challenge.

Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
More Cloud, Video on the Way

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.