Viavi Solutions today released the results of its 10th annual State of the Network global study, which focuses on the growing issue of security threats. Now available for download, respondents included 1,035 CIOs, IT directors, and network engineers.

"Enterprise network teams are expending more time and resources than ever before to battle security threats," said Douglas Roberts, vice president and general manager, enterprise and cloud business unit at Viavi. "Not only are they faced with a growing number of attacks, but hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their methods and malware.

"Dealing with these types of advanced, persistent security threats requires planning, resourcefulness and greater visibility throughout the network to ensure that threat intelligence information is always at hand."

The study found that: 88% of respondents say they are involved in troubleshooting security-related issues. Of those, nearly 80% report an increase in the time they spend on such issues, with nearly three out of four spending up to 10 hours a week on them. 

When asked how the nature of security threats has changed in the past year, IT teams have identified a rise in e-mail and browser-based malware attacks (63%), and an increase in threat sophistication (52%). Nearly one in three also report a surge in distributed denial of service (DDos) attacks.

Syslogs were cited by nearly a third of respondents as the primary method for detecting security issues, followed by long-term packet capture and analysis (23%) and performance anomalies (15%). 

Bandwidth usage in enterprises continues to surge, with two out of three respondents expecting bandwidth demand to grow by up to 50% in 2017. This trend is in turn driving increased adoption of emerging technologies including software-defined networks (SDN), public and private clouds and 100 GbE. Network teams are managing these major initiatives while simultaneously confronting an aggressive rise in security issues.

"A combination of new technology adoption, accelerating traffic growth and mounting security risks has spawned unprecedented challenges throughout the enterprise market," said Shamus McGillicuddy, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. 

"The need to detect and deal with security threats is notably complicated by the diverse mix of today's enterprise traffic, which spans across virtual, public and hybrid cloud environments in addition to physical servers." 

For more information, you can download Viavi's 10th Annual State of Network Security Study below.

 Thanks to Connections for this article.