EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

The WAN edge is becoming more distributed and dynamic, which is overburdening IT organizations that are already at a breaking point. Software-defined WAN technology has solved some of the issue, but they haven’t gone far enough. The cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the work-from-home (WFH) revolution demand something more.

Data center network automation delivers four primary benefits to a business, according to Enterprise Management Associates research: operational efficiency, reduced security risk, improved compliance, and network agility.

Sponsored post for Gluware

More than 75% of enterprises are reporting increased collaboration between their NetOps teams and SecOps teams , according to EMA's new research on NetSecOps partnerships. Digital transformation is a significant driver of this collaboration. About four out of five enterprises reported that NetSecOps collaboration is in response to public cloud adoption, work-from-anywhere initiatives, data center modernization, the internet of things, and edge computing.

Five years and $1 billion in R&D investment has led to this. Cisco has positioned itself to be a jack-of-all trades routing supplier to network service providers and web-scale data center operators.

Today’s cloud-centric enterprises require agile infrastructure that can scale up and down as capacity requirements evolve. Nowhere is this shift in infrastructure requirements more apparent than in the world of application delivery controllers (ADCs) and load balancers. Today’s enterprises are shifting away from monolithic ADC appliances in favor of lightweight, per-application software ADCs and load balancers.

Network managers who are supporting the migration of critical applications to the public cloud will need a new set of tools for engineering and operations.

For years network engineers have built lucrative careers upon their wizardly knowledge of things like network protocols, hardware specifications, and the Cisco command line interface (CLI). These skills are still essential to network engineering, but they are emblematic of a highly manual, box-by-box era of network engineering and operations. Today’s enterprises need agile, programmatic networks that leverage software, automation, and more

Editor’s note: This blog post was sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, but the sentiments are entirely my own.