VIAVI releases results of 'State of the Network' global study of enterprise networking challenges

Viavi Solutions released the results of its 12th annual State of the Network global study of enterprise networking challenges. The data reflects that more than 4 in 5 IT teams are involved in security efforts, and a majority of them report an increase of at least 25 percent in time spent on these efforts over the past 12 months. The most striking conclusion is that network-based conversation wire data has become the top data source for security incidents, with its use tripling, demonstrating that threat levels have driven enterprises to seek the most reliable forensic data available. The study is now available for download.

 
 
The State of the Network study captured the insights of Network Operations (NetOps) and Security Operations (SecOps) professionals worldwide, highlighting their challenges in security, performance management and deployment of new technologies. Eighty-three percent of network teams are now engaged in supporting security issues, and of those, 91 percent spend up to 10 hours or more per week dealing with increasingly sophisticated security threats. As hackers continue to circumvent existing security tools — even those with AI or machine learning — additional strategies are needed to quickly identify and contain security threats, the consequences of which can be devastating.

 
“This year’s State of the Network study highlights a clear way forward in today’s IT reality with a combination of prevention and ongoing detection to catch threats not flagged by security tools alone, such as an internal data breach by an employee, whether accidental or intentional. IT professionals need to better understand what is normal network behavior and what is not, and engage in proactive threat hunting,” said Douglas Roberts, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise & Cloud Business Unit, VIAVI. 

 
Wire data has taken a central role in resolving suspected or known security threats, with 71 percent of respondents reporting that they used packet capture and 46 percent reporting that they used flow data, compared to 23 percent and 10 percent respectively in the 2017 State of the Network study.

IT teams identified a rise in email and browser-based malware attacks (59 percent), and an increase in threat sophistication (57 percent). Significant numbers of respondents also reported increases in exfiltration attacks on database servers (34 percent), application attacks (33 percent), DDOS attacks (32 percent) and ransomware attacks (30 percent).

VIAVI has conducted its State of the Network global study for 12 consecutive years, drawing insight about network trends and painting a picture of the challenges faced by IT teams. Results were compiled from the insights of over 600 respondents, including network engineers, IT directors, security engineers and CIOs from around the world. In addition to geographic diversity, the study population was evenly distributed among networks and business verticals of different sizes. Study questions were designed based on a survey of network professionals.