Easynet Global Services, a managed cloud infrastructure business, has released the results of a study examining the challenges faced by public sector organisations regarding performance of their critical IT applications.
The study, titled ‘KillerApps 2013‘, focused on business-critical applications used by public sector organisations and how these applications performed within a corporate network. The study found that only 28% of public sector organisations use their network to its full potential. 75% of respondents claim to experience application performance problems caused by inefficient network management, while only 44% understand how much bandwidth each of their applications require.
Due to congested and overstretched networks, poorly performing applications can lead to a decrease in productivity and frustration as users are forced to wait for slow or non-responsive IT applications. 45% of companies have seen this problem become more frequent.
Alan Fogden, head of public sector at Easynet Global Services, said: "What’s clear from this research is that public sector organisations need to challenge traditional ways of working to increase the efficiency and value for money of their corporate networks. By thinking about how much network resource each key application actually needs and setting some basic controls the sector could begin running the asset at full capacity reducing costly upgrades."
The study found that 79% of IT professionals within companies see the data requirements of their corporate network increase by at least 10% per annum, with one quarter of respondents seeing growth at 20% or more. So although companies are investing more in their network with budgets rising for 37% of organisations, the research shows that network assets could be used more efficiently.
Fogden believes that companies that are struggling with IT management and non-responsive or slow applications need to achieve a greater knowledge of their networks to combat the problem. "Simply throwing additional network capacity at this problem won’t fix it. Public sector companies need a more thorough understanding of what’s happening across their networks with the ability to manage the performance of those applications that really matter."
