VIAVI Solutions, in collaboration with TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), has announced the release of its 2024/25 state of the network study. The research, involving 754 respondents from 10 countries, focuses on the evolution of network performance and security tools over the past 16 years, assessing their impact on the observability and security posture of enterprise organisations.
According to the report, organisations with a formal observability strategy are 3.5 times more likely to detect disruptive incidents quickly compared to those without such a strategy. This approach not only shortens incident detection times but also brings additional benefits, such as enhanced security (83 per cent), faster product/service advancements (82 per cent), and improved compliance (78 per cent).
The report states that network observability provides deep insights into network behaviour, performance, and health by collecting, analysing, and presenting data, enabling administrators to understand and manage the network in real time. True network observability embraces and leverages all network data sets, including flow data, packet data, and metrics. Unlike traditional monitoring, which primarily focuses on identifying and alerting on predefined issues, observability enables information technology (IT) teams to proactively detect, understand, and resolve incidents in real-time. By adopting an observability strategy, organisations can proactively manage network performance, improve problem resolution, and maintain higher levels of user satisfaction.
The report also highlighted the critical need for continuous threat exposure management (CTEM), with 88 per cent organisations highlighting an urgent need to improve their threat management capabilities. CTEM is an emerging strategy that systematically evaluates and prioritises risks, allowing organisations to allocate resources more effectively and focus on the most significant threats. By integrating threat exposure management with attack surface management, CTEM helps organisations enhance their security posture and operational resilience, ensuring they can proactively manage and mitigate evolving threats. CTEM programs are now gaining traction, ranking behind patch management and vulnerability assessments only among current methods for managing threat exposure.
Commenting on the report, Chris Labac, vice president and general manager, network performance and threat solutions, VIAVI, said, “Organisations are increasingly recognising the transformative impact of observability on network management and security. This report demonstrates a clear trend toward network observability, not only as a way of enhancing security, achieving compliance objectives, and detecting incidents, but as a key driver of business.”
Meanwhile, Jim Frey, principal analyst, Networking, ESG, said, “As discovered by VIAVI and ESG, the state of the network is ever more vital to business success, even as it is continuously stretched, evolved, clouded and threatened. Organisations are recognising the challenges posed by sprawl in monitoring tools and increasingly complex hybrid network architectures, and those making the move, strategically or otherwise, to network observability are seeing significant improvements. In parallel with operational advantages, this move empowers organisations to pursue convergence of observability and security and enable important new strategies such as continuous threat exposure management.”
