EMA Research Blog: Navigating IT and Security Horizons

What should machine and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) do for IT operations, DevOps and container management? The following table represents my quick outline of the key challenges and specific problem ML/AI needs to address. The table is based on the believe that ML/AI needs to look over the shoulder of IT ops, DevOps, and business management teams to learn from their decision making. In other words, every virtualization administrator fulfills infrastructure provisioning or upgrade requests a little bit differently. Please regard the below table as a preliminary outline and basis for discussion. At this point, and probably at no future point either, I won't claim to know the 'ultimate truth.'

Network Operations and Analytics from CA Technologies has been named a winner of Enterprise Management Associates’ Innovator Award, which recognizes products and services that demonstrate true innovation in the IT industry and address the most critical challenges IT organizations face today.

EMA research has determined that network managers will need to upgrade, expand, and adapt their network monitoring and management tools and practices if they are going to support the Internet of Things (IoT).

Some network operations teams are discovering that they possess a critical asset that can transform enterprises: network data.

I recently presented findings from my Workload Automation (WLA) research and other EMA research on a webinar with Tim Eusterman, Sr. Director Solutions Marketing at BMC in a webinar titled “How Digital Business is Shaping the Next Wave of Automation”. The recording of the webinar is now live here, and the slides are available here.

IT analytics vendor ExtraHop unveiled a cloud-based service that applies machine learning heuristics to the metadata that its appliances generate from packet stream analysis. The service should give users better visibility into IT service problems and security threats.

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) recently unveiled plans to redefine itself for the post-hype phase of software-defined networking (SDN). I welcome the ONF’s reset and believe it bodes well for the industry’s future.

Editor’s Note: This blog post is sponsored by Citrix. The ideas and analysis are entirely the authors own.

The growing market for analytics in IT is one of the more exciting areas to watch in the technology industry. Exciting because of the variety and types of vendor innovation in this area. And exciting as well because our research indicates the adoption of advanced IT analytics supports data sharing and joint decision making in a way that’s catalytic for both IT and digital transformation.

“Today, a dev team leveraging Kubernetes containers can get a cloud app up in minutes.” This statement by Arvind Krishna, IBM’s GM for Hybrid Cloud, at the beginning of his InterConnect 2017 keynote should have received a lot more recognition than it did. This one sentence shows the fundamental shift in IBM’s strategy, away from the old Tivoli-centric IT ops company and toward a modern DevOps-focused organization that is looking for differentiation up the stack. Today’s IBM encourages developers to deploy entire application environments without IT administrators even being aware.