As businesses across the world increase the number of new application rollouts and create innovative connected user experiences to better serve their customers, IT departments face the challenge of expanding network services and aligning their network strategies to meet the requirements of the organizations within which they operate.

According to the latest Cisco IT Global Impact Survey, research exploring the views of 1,300 IT decision makers across 13 countries, while the perception of alignment exists within many business organizations, in reality IT is often left in the dark when business critical decisions reliant on a solid network are made. As such, IT is left struggling to support new application roll-outs and lack the insight needed to deploy the technology used to support new opportunities and core business functions.

Perception vs reality
IT and business leaders do have a mutual understanding that collaboration is essential for success and that a critical and growing role of the network for application delivery exists.

According to the latest Cisco IT Global Impact Survey, 89% of respondents reported that they collaborate with business leaders more than once a month and 63% are confident their IT departments can respond to business needs.

However, 76% of IT decision makers reported business leaders and other non-IT teams roll out new applications without engaging IT either “all the time” or “sometimes”.

Furthermore, 38% of IT professionals are brought into the planning and deployment process late.

This demonstrates engagement doesn’t necessarily always equate to alignment and the guarantee that applications will be deployed successfully. In reality major challenges continue and scope for substantial improvement and bridging the divide exists.

In fact, over the past 12 months respondents reported an entire catalogue of reasons as to why application rollouts regularly fell behind schedule or were severely delayed. These ranged from lack of budget, network limitations to data center infrastructure and cloud infrastructure readiness. As further demonstration of the divide, 18% of IT leaders reported that they would rather break out of prison or train for a triathlon than ask for additional budget.

Affecting growth
With heads-of-business beginning to understand the growing importance of the role of the network for application delivery, 82% of respondents acknowledged that user experience with standard business applications is affected by network performance, even in basic applications such as Web, file services and email.

Emerging trends such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and the Internet of Everything (IoE) are poised to challenge the network. Without proper collaboration and planning between IT and business leaders, the ability to take advantage of growth opportunities will be greatly reduced.

With expectations from heads-of-business to take advantage of these technologies, 71% of respondents globally plan to deploy SDN solutions in the next 12 months. The main reasons given for this by a third of respondents were cost savings and fast scalability of infrastructure.

However, a lack of SDN understanding still prevails in many IT departments, with 34% of respondents claiming they’ve seen an actual SDN deployment as often as they’ve seen Elvis, Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster!

When asked about the value of the IoE to their business, nearly half of respondents believe it will open up new business opportunities, showing an appetite by IT to take advantage of these ever-increasingly influential technologies.

Optimistic BRICs
According to the research, developing markets and BRIC – Brazil, Russia, India and China - economies are also more optimistic about embracing the challenge of aligning business and IT.

One year from now, 47% of Brazilian, 42% of Mexican, as well as 36% of Indian and Chinese IT decision makers believe more than 50% of their applications will be cloud-based. This compares with only 20% of IT decision makers in the UK.

Furthermore, around a third of Brazilian, Mexican and Indian respondents believe more than 75% of their employees will make use of BYOD compared with 8% in UK.

In terms of embracing new technological concepts, the education of IT teams in Brazil, Mexico and China regarding SDN and IoE also overshadows that of the UK. Thirty percent of UK respondents weren’t familiar with SDN, compared with 7% in China and 13% in Brazil. IT teams in these countries also seem more ready to embrace and take advantage of such technology.

Only 35% of UK respondents are currently considering SDN compared with 77% in China and 59% in Brazil. Sixty-nine percent of Brazilian and Chinese are also more likely to be very familiar with the Internet of Everything and optimistic about using it for business opportunities compared with 33% in UK.

As businesses increase application rollouts and create new connected user experiences to better serve customers, IT organizations in the UK, Europe and globally need to expand network services and align network strategies to meet business requirements. Greater collaboration with business heads and the earlier involvement of IT during the application role out will help ensure the gap between business expectations and capabilities continues to close for the benefit of the entire enterprise.