The new reality of the modern workplace is continuous support for remote workers, but the widespread proliferation of cloud infrastructure to support hybrid infrastructures creates challenges of increased complexity and visibility for network operations teams, according to a Broadcom study, with teams lacking qualified. a growing challenge.

the study, Cloud and Internet usage creates network observability blind spotssurveyed 505 networking, operations, cloud and architecture professionals from mid-sized to global companies, representing all seniority levels. Respondents were invited to comment on their company’s network operations practices. The participants were from five continents and all had enterprise security responsibilities.

With 98% of companies using or planning to use cloud infrastructure and 95% enabling remote workers, the network has become increasingly complex, as noted by 78% of respondents. Network endpoints are spread far and wide and often exist in workers’ homes, making it difficult to gain the visibility needed to ensure operation, performance and security.

However, among the notable findings uncovered was a surprising lack of skilled workers, which required nearly two-thirds of respondents to rely on third-party resources for network operations. Broadcom said such findings paint a worrying picture as organizations struggle to meet the demand for modern IT networks.

An additional challenge is the lack of information provided by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and cloud providers, leading 80% to say that Internet and cloud environments create network blind spots that can often create delays in fixing problems. These findings indicate that most companies lack adequate network operations and observability tools for today’s modern IT environment.

When asked about the specific challenges they face managing network operations, 41 percent indicated a lack of necessary skills, while not having enough operations staff was cited by 31 percent. Digging deeper to understand what inhibits teams’ ability to grow, nearly half (48%) of respondents said candidates lack the necessary skills and 45% indicated a general lack of available candidates.

In what Broadcom said was no surprise, it found that two-thirds of organizations are turning to third parties for network operations support — a stop-gap measure to fill the gap, but not a long-term solution. The result was that few teams were gaining the hands-on experience needed to develop the capabilities they needed to manage the network themselves, and consequently a greater reliance on third-party tools and data.

Another key concern revealed was that teams lacked critical data and were learning about issues from users. Indeed, this has been cited by up to 84% of network professionals, meaning that users are experiencing performance issues before the network team even knows about it. This was seen as a clear reflection of the lack of information that network teams have access to. Furthermore, 95% of respondents said they are not getting the information they need from ISPs and cloud providers. Just over three-quarters of respondents felt that slow or missing data directly hindered resolution times.

“Ensuring network performance is critical to every business. However, the data shows that teams are not getting the support, staff or tools they need to simplify their work,” said Mike Melillo, senior director of network management solutions at Broadcom. “Given the importance of the network to modern business, the industry must continue to work to collect, correlate and normalize multi-vendor network data that produces intelligent remediation recommendations and focused triage workflows and helps solve the challenges captured in this project of research. “