EMA Research Blog: Navigating IT and Security Horizons

EMA turns 30 this year. We're not the largest analyst firm, and we’re not the loudest. What we have always strived to be is honest, independent, and reliable.

The network infrastructure and operations industry is on fire. How do I know? Just look at how busy the Network Infrastructure and Operations practice at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) was in 2025.

A growing number of network engineering teams are adopting network source of truth tools. What are they? And how should you go about setting one up? Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has published new research on this subject that answers these questions. For this research, EMA analysts conducted long-form interviews with 17 network engineers about their approaches to establishing and maintaining a network source of truth.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

To offer more affordable and compact solutions, some solution providers are pitching triggered or “smart” packet capture solutions as an alternative to always-on capture.

More than 41% of DDI (DNS, DHCP and IP address management) teams lack sufficient influence over their companies’ cloud strategies, according to my research. This stat was published in my market research report, “DDI Directions: DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management Strategies for the Multi-Cloud Era.” The report was based on a survey of 333 DDI-focused IT professionals.