IT managers are rethinking their reliance on the public Internet and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), the traditional standard used in wide area network environments, according to new research from UBM Tech.

The survey, sponsored by Comcast Business, revealed that organizations are intent on meeting key business goals, such as boosting employee productivity and reducing expenses associated with communications and IT operations. Some have turned to hosted cloud services to achieve these goals.

Yet, despite their concerns about cloud reliability, performance and security, many IT leaders surveyed acknowledged that they use the public Internet to link to cloud services, despite the inherent shortcomings in those key areas.

Enterprises need an updated networking strategy to handle the large volumes of information flowing to and from data centers and public clouds. That’s why a growing number of IT leaders are looking for private WAN services with capabilities tailored for business needs, and that take advantage of familiar networking standards, such as the venerable Ethernet protocol.

To learn more about these findings, download the full PDF here.