What causes networks to fail?

Network outages are a major source of pain for businesses, so understanding what causes them is an important part of preventing them in the first place.

A new survey from Veriflow reveals that complexity and human error are high on the list as contributing to network problems.

Of 300 plus network professionals responding to the survey, 97 percent admit that human factors cause network outages. Yet despite this 69 percent of respondents still 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.

Network changes significantly impact the business several times a year or more according to 74 percent. And as networks grow in complexity, the number of network outages tends to increase as well, according to more than half of respondents (59 percent).

"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", says 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".

The survey also looks at compliance issues. Three quarters of respondents say their organization has network compliance requirements in place to ensure privacy and security of data and systems. But despite this 80 percent say they lack full confidence that their network is always compliant, and 83 percent say that compliance reporting requires manual effort.

You can read more about the survey results as well as the Veriflow's new platform to help prevent network failures on the company's blog. There's also a summary of the survey findings as an infographic below.

Photo credit: Denis Rozhnovsky / Shutterstock