In honor of Halloween, we reached out to our community of 70,000 plus on social media to get a sense of what scenarios make them squeamish, give them the creepy crawlies and send them ducking under the covers. While none of the scenarios offered in our poll was a welcome sight to anyone, the top four events that haunt our respondents are:
1. Network Security Attacks
Given that security attacks can appear out of nowhere and sometimes lurk in the shadows for years, it’s not surprising that the worst-case scenarios continue to haunt the thoughts of network managers. In our poll, 41 percent of respondents said that the possibility of an attack on their network scares them more than any other potential problem and it’s only getting worse. As networks continue to grow in size and complexity, the potential for attacks will increase.
2. Data Center Migrations
Coming in second with 24 percent of the responses is network migration. Network engineers often have nightmares about data center migrations. Not only can it take months to complete a migration, most organizations will face multiple network outages during that timeframe. Today’s networks consist of hundreds of thousands of components that will need to be discovered, verified and documented. In fact, data from AlogSec shows that two out of every three organizations face unexpected application disruptions during a data center migration project.
3. Network Outages
Running a close third is the dreaded network downtime with 22 percent of the vote. Every minute the network is down is a negative impact on the bottom line. For network engineers, it normally also involves a tedious, manual troubleshooting process. For those that haven’t used automation to accelerate the mean time to repair (MTTR) this truly is a nightmare scenario.
4. Network Audits
Closing out the voting of bad to worse scenarios is the network audit with 14 percent of respondents indicating that auditors are the devil in disguise. While still a situation nobody asks for, this number has shrunk considerably in recent years highlighting the fact that network tools have improved enough to make the audit just a little less scary.
Here we have presented four network nightmares, are there more? Are there are other scenarios that have you waking up in a cold sweat at night? Fearing the dawn of a new workday? Please let us know, we’d love to hear from you as we continue our quest to hunt down the network ghouls and goblins making your lives miserable. While there are still many potentially horrifying issues to contend with, organizations that are leveraging automation are sleeping easier at night, knowing that the most tedious and risky parts of the project can be handled without any risk.