Half of enterprise networks to be obsolete: Study

BANGALORE, INDIA: In another five years down the line about half of all enterprise networks will be obsolete, thanks to trends such as BYOD, video and virtualization. This is according to Cisco reseller Dimension Data's annual Network Barometer Report.

The total number of devices that were past end-of-sale (EoS) jumped from 38 per cent to 45 per cent in 2012, a seven per cent jump from 2011.

"This increase in obsolescence could be attributed to two factors. Firstly, organisations may be choosing to sweat their assets longer. This can be for various reasons, one of which is that in times of economic downturn, capital expenditures generally slow down and organisations look to maximise the useful life of their assets. Secondly, while manufacturers are always aging out older platforms, some product development cycles are more robust than others. This results in an increase in the overall number of products that must go EoS in order to make way for newer platforms,' says the study.

Some other findings are:

The percentage of devices that were EoS jumped from 4.2 per cent in 2011 to 70 per cent in 2012.

Seventy five per cent of all devices carry at least one known security vulnerability.

802.11n access point penetration will be greater than 50 per cent next year. However, the continued adoption of 802.11n (through new deployments as well as the replacements of existing older access points) will put significant pressure on the network wiring closet. In order to fully leverage 802.11n capabilities, access switches will need — at a minimum — to support gigabit Ethernet to accommodate the 150-300MBPS bandwidth capability and Power over Ethernet to power the devices.

The larger the network and the more extensive the associated services that run on it, the higher the number of IOS versions. On an average of 5.1 major versions of IOS and 20.3 unique versions of IOS were discovered per assessment.