Networking vendor Emulex claims companies are wasting time and money on avoidable networking failures. It claims they fail to monitor their networks, then waste even more time and money in a round of 'blamestorming'.

Emulex has released the results of a recent study of 547 US and European network and security operations (NetOps and SecOps) staff. It found that 45% of them shun IT in favour of manual monitoring of their networks.

The study found that once companies have allowed a problem to take place, 77% of the network and security failures are subsequently misdiagnosed as attempts are made to react to the event. Nearly three quarters (73%) of the NetOps and SecOps quizzed said they still have unresolved network events.

According to the study, there is evidence that this leads to internal finger pointing, as 79% of those surveyed said network events were attributed to the wrong IT group. An even more frequent failure, found among 87% of respondents, was that they didn’t have enough information to make an accurate assessment of the problem.

Four in five of the sample admitted that security and networking breaches are increasingly frequent. On seven out of ten occasions the network crisis takes at least a day to diagnose, at a cost that was quantified at half a million dollars per hour by around half (52%) of the US study group.

Shaun Walsh, Emulex’s senior marketing VP, said the combination of virtualization and high performing software-defined networks will give data center managers and IT service providers increasingly sophisticated challenges. The best way to minimize these costs will be to pre-empt them, he said. “The clear message from this survey is that one of the best tools for SecOps and NetOps professionals to have at their disposal is 100 percent network visibility,” said Walsh, “IT professionals must maximize application delivery, protect their corporate assets and avoid the IT blame game.”