Holiday blues: 49% of network managers, sysadmins expect to work the holidays

Nearly half of IT pros will be working or on-call over the holidays to troubleshoot network, security and app problems, according to net management vendor Ipswitch.

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Will you be stuck working or on-call as 2014 comes to a close? If so, you're not alone.

This year, 49% of IT pros expect to work over the holidays, according to network management vendor Ipswitch. Nearly the same number (48%) will be thinking about work even if they're not called into the office.

Ipswitch polled 206 IT pros in the U.S. for its second annual "Happy Holidays?" survey.

Past experience shows it's necessary: 33% of IT pros said their company has experienced a major network outage during a holiday.

More common for IT pros is the need to deal with employees' offsite IT issues. The most common problems employees experience when the office is closed for the holidays are: inability to access the network remotely (cited by 57%); poor application performance (18%); forgotten passwords (18%); and malfunctioning laptops (7%).

Looking ahead to 2015, respondents ranked a few meaningful New Year's resolutions, including: solving network and IT problems faster (43%), increasing IT security measures (43%), and finding wireless bandwidth hoarders (14%).