No Holiday Rest for IT Weary

While most are drinking eggnog and watching Twilight Zone marathons, many in IT are manning the barricades, keeping corporate networks safe from holiday hacker grinches. This all according to a survey by Ipswitch (News - Alert) Networks of 116 IT pros.

Nearly half of these folks, some 46 percent, are on call during this holiday season. And it’s not that their bosses are all Scrooges. Networks go down during Christmas and New Year’s just as they do in the height of the summer, with one third of these IT pros experiencing a major outage during the holidays.

“Even the holidays don’t provide a brief respite for many hardworking IT pros,” said Ennio Carboni, president and general manager at the Ipswitch Network Management Division. “Networks are like Ebenezer Scrooge, they just don’t care if it’s Christmas. Be sure to thank your hardworking IT pro this holiday season, as they may be giving up downtime with friends and family to make sure your networks have uptime.”

The biggest holiday network issue is just plain getting access, with remote access problems serving as the biggest gripe for 51 percent of respondents, subpar application performance bugging 26 percent, and forgotten passwords negatively impacting 17 percent. 

But these same IT pros hope for better next year. “Respondents see hope for 2014, though. Their New Year’s Resolutions included spending less time dealing with network problems (56 percent), increasing IT security measures (33 percent) and addressing network problems related to BYOD (11 percent),” Ipswitch said. Another New Year’s resolution includes finding those that hoard wireless bandwidth.

So what do these IT pros want to come down the chimney this year? Ipswitch found:

• “Xbox One – 17 percent
• PS4 – 19 percent
• iPhone (News - Alert) (News - Alert) – 8 percent
• Droid smartphone – 11 percent
• iPad Air – 31 percent
• Nexus 7 – 14 percent”