Growing cyber security issues are consuming network teams’ time than ever before, results of its tenth annual State of the Network global study by Viavi Solutions showed.
In the survey of 1,035 CIOs, IT directors, and network engineers around the world, 88 percent of respondents said that they’re now involved in troubleshooting security-related issues.
Of those, nearly 80 percent report an increase in the time they spend on such issues, with nearly three out of four spending up to 10 hours a week on them.
When asked how the nature of security threats has changed in the past year, 60 percent of IT teams have identified a rise in email and browser-based malware attacks (60 percent) 52 percent identified an increase in threat sophistication.
At the same time, nearly one in three also report a surge in distributed denial of service (DDos) attacks.
Also connected with security, nearly a third of respondents cited Syslogs as the primary method for detecting security issues, followed by long-term packet capture and analysis, and performance anomalies.
“As our State of the Network study shows, enterprise network teams are expending more time and resources than ever before to battle security threats. Not only are they faced with a growing number of attacks, but hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their methods and malware,” said Douglas Roberts, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise & Cloud Business Unit, Viavi Solutions.
“Dealing with these types of advanced, persistent security threats requires planning, resourcefulness and greater visibility throughout the network to ensure that threat intelligence information is always at hand.”
Further, the survey found that bandwidth usage in enterprises continues to surge, with two out of three respondents expecting bandwidth demand to grow by up to 50 percent in 2017.
This trend is in turn driving increased adoption of emerging technologies including software-defined networks (SDN), public and private clouds and 100 Gb. Network teams are managing these major initiatives while simultaneously confronting an aggressive rise in security issues.
“The necessity to detect and deal with security threats is notably complicated by the diverse mix of today’s enterprise traffic, which spans across virtual, public and hybrid cloud environments in addition to physical servers,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Management Associates.
