EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

I recently had the opportunity to attend Identity Week in Washington, D.C. While this is a smaller conference compared to RSA Conference or Black Hat, some of the conversations were just as powerful and much more focused on the identity market. I was at first encouraged by the large focus of biometrics at the conference, but quickly discouraged upon seeing the limited use cases many of the vendors were promoting.

Generative AI hype has permeated the world of IT operations. My latest research found that 96% of IT pros who have evaluated or used generative AI for IT management use cases believe it can make people in their organizations more productive.

Network as a service (NaaS) is a class of network infrastructure solutions that are delivered via a cloud-consumption model. Often, these networks are managed offerings, where the provider takes ownership of implementation and day-to-day operations. While a NaaS provider is capable of taking over network management for a customer, many IT organizations prefer to maintain some control and ownership of day-to-day operations for a NaaS-based network. 

Fresh off a week at the Splunk conference (called .conf24), I want to share a few insights about my time at the show.

Cisco Live is happening in Las Vegas this week. It remains one of the biggest annual gatherings of network infrastructure professionals in the world. It is also a venue for Cisco to showcase its latest products and services, and it is a place where Cisco lays out its overall vision to address customer requirements.

Another RSA conference (not RSA, not #RSA, but “THE RSA Conference” – those that bought the conference do not want it to be associated with RSA the company, which leads me to wonder why they didn’t just rename the thing to something else more securityish) is in the books, and I thought I would share a few thoughts about things I saw and vendors that I met with at the conference.

According to the RSA Conference website, there was a total of 641 vendors exhibiting or sponsoring the conference in the over 738,000 square feet of exhibit space dedicated within the two-million-square-foot Moscone Center. I had meetings scheduled with approximately 20 of these vendors and met with a small handful of additional vendors on the expo floor as time permitted. I didn’t keep track of how far I walked this year, but the entire Moscone Center complex is approximately 87 acres in size. For comparison, the United States Capitol building is only 4 acres. I made several laps around the expo floor each day, as well as walking around the entire complex throughout various parts of the day. Needless to say, my feet are quite tired, but with the conversations I had with vendors, it was worth it.

IT organizations have always relied on multiple tools to manage and monitor their networks. This reality is a legacy of the evolution of network management tools. Initially, vendors offered point products that solved very narrow sets of tool use cases like device discovery, device metric collection, config management, traffic monitoring, and so on. Network engineers needed a sprawling toolset to address all aspects of operations.

The RSA Conference 2024 is upon us, and this year promises to be a treasure trove of insights for security professionals. We're particularly excited to explore the latest advancements in areas like AI-powered security and cloud protection. To enhance our analysis, we're putting Google Gemini, a large language model, to the test. Can it navigate the vast amount of information available about the conference and identify the themes that matter most? In this blog, we’ll explore the conference through the lens of Google Gemini, offering previews of sponsor briefings, session topics, and emerging trends that will shape the future of cybersecurity, and we’ll also examine Gemini’s ability to analyze text data.

For most IT organizations, network automation boils down to change management. Network engineering teams implement tools that automate their processes for all manner of changes, including network software patches and upgrades, configuration changes, and security policy updates.