Burnout is real and it is taking its toll on businesses across industries. According to a Deloitte survey, 77% of professionals have experienced burnout at least once.
More specifically, in the IT sector 40% of IT workers are at high risk of burnout today. It’s become a big problem, even before the Great Resignation, which has since turned into the Quiet Quitting phenomenon.
The bottom line is that employees feel their job demands are more significant than the resources they have available to accomplish them. For IT professionals tasked with managing their corporate networks, the challenge is more strain on their networks, which requires more management and maintenance. There are more users, devices, locations, applications, security risks, and issues. Yet, too often, IT teams aren’t given more – or better tools – to ensure their networks live up to expectations, resulting in spending long hours that eat into work-life balance.
When that happens, stress and tension increase, mistakes become more likely – including the potential for security mishaps – and network performance and user experiences suffer.
These aren’t outlying issues. Almost half of IT professionals at high risk of burnout are considering quitting. 62% say they feel emotionally and physically drained – and more than half say they can’t relax when their workday is over. They are a small step from complete burnout and potential network nightmares.
It’s not all gloom and doom, though. Businesses have options that can remedy these situations, improve results, and reduce the stress and risk of burnout among their IT teams. Modern workforces need modern networks, and modern IT needs modern tools. With network complexity increasing, especially with distributed workforces , IT needs tools such as the ones listed below to effectively – and efficiently – manage their network resources.
Cloud-native SD-WAN – Nothing frustrates users more than poor performance. A cloud-native SD-WAN ensures connectivity and application performance are constantly optimized across your WAN, and multi-cloud environments, anywhere your workers are located. Applications are detected automatically, traffic routing and prioritization are handled through performance-based dynamic WAN selection. It’s a win-win: users have better experiences, and IT doesn’t have to worry about application performance or connectivity issues.
Unified Network Management – Your IT team needs visibility into your entire network, including your wired and wireless networks, as well as your SD-WAN. A cloud-based network management platform gives them the capability to see their entire organization at once. A single-vendor network management application unites your entire end-to-end network – branch, data center, cloud – simplifying management significantly compared to managing multiple, disparate resources.
Artificial Intelligence – As your network environment becomes increasingly complex, visibility isn’t enough. AI brings network intelligence to IT admins, identifying hardware, software, or user anomalies that could impact network or application performance. Rather than manually seeking out problems, IT is pointed directly to the source and can address issues before they impact performance.
Integrated Security – There may not be a more critical demand for IT than security today, given the cost of downtime and breaches. Having security integrated into your SD-WAN solution offers an added layer of protection for your entire organization and further reduces the burden on your IT team.
What’s the catch? There really isn’t one. If you’re ready to take your networking to the next level – and reduce burnout risk among your IT organization – give them tools to manage you’re the network more efficiently and effectively . They will be happier and less likely to become frustrated or make costly mistakes. Your entire Infinite Enterprise user base will benefit from a next-gen, cloud-managed network that can handle today’s demands.
Originally published on the Extreme Networks blog, October 13, 2022.
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