16 April 2012

Trend: Performance problems despite new network technology, IT infrastructure and network performance

Since late 2010 significant performance problems have been mounting for clients not only despite expansion of their data networks but also due to the expansion of their data networks. You can easily imagine how much pressure the CIO is under if they spend money and the users suffer damage from slow applications and generally unacceptable performance. The resulting damage to the business often costs more than the entire IT budget. The problems are usually complex and are not easily recognized because traditional monitoring often indicates that nothing is wrong. In particular, today's common network monitoring is not up to the task. Gigabit technology is considerably more sensitive - in terms of the passive infrastructure it is ten times more sensitive than previous technologies. Many manufacturers' architecture recommendations lead directly to problems. For legal reasons, the manufacturer cannot provide better architecture recommendations. Furthermore, it can hardly motivate the manufacturers to have to cut the customer's capacity requirements in halve. Many CIOs and board members in Germany justifiably lost their jobs in 2011 because of such problems. The CIOs thought they had staff to take care of the network problems. However a decade of austerity measures limiting seminars, events and external auditors have let expertise waste away.

Since external experts are available immediately while training of internal staff will take years, there is a wave of audits with rapidly increasing daily rates due to the shortage of experts needed to operate complex instrumentation and measurement software and write the necessary reports.