Despite the financial challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, 62 per cent of organisations are planning to increase their spending on SD-WAN, followed by private 5G (52%), and AI operations (45%), while supporting a surge in the use of unified communications (UC) platforms and collaboration tools, security threat detection and remediation, and addressing the skills gap, according to ‘14th annual State of the Network’ report by network testing firm VIAVI Solutions.

Despite the work-from-home norm of today, IT teams have been able to mitigate the impact of the pandemic and have adapted to managing end-user experience.

According to the report, organisations now spend about 10 hours per week addressing issues related to UC and collaboration tools such as WebEx, Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

But at the same time, they have had to deal with a growing skills gap.

Organisations responded that their top application troubleshooting challenge was the lack of requisite talent to solve performance issues.

This gap was the most pronounced among organisations with less than US$2 billion in revenue, with more than 90 per cent mid-sized companies saying they faced difficulties in attracting the right talent to deal with technical challenges.

“The past year has been transformative for enterprises, as IT teams adapted to the task of maintaining smooth service delivery and optimal end-user experience in spite of pandemic-related disruptions,” said Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise and Cloud, VIAVI, Charles Thompson.

“A widening skills gap is creating a troubleshooting hurdle more difficult than any technical issue, even as NetOps teams are spending more time than ever dealing with heightened security concerns,” Thompson pointed out.

It highlighted that Cloud has emerged as the top choice for hosting critical applications, owing to its “service availability and reliability”.

More than 90 per cent of IT teams said they will deploy 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) during the next three years, while 80 per cent are planning to deploy 400GbE.

According to VIAVI, the results are compiled from 794 respondents, including network engineers, IT directors, security engineers and CIOs worldwide.