EMA Research Blog: Navigating IT and Security Horizons

Network data quality and authority have been problems for a very long time, and IT organizations can no longer afford to ignore the issue. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recommends that CIOs establish a network data architecture team and give it the budget and authority needed to improve the data that IT organizations rely on for day-to-day network operations.

The talent pipeline for network engineering and operations teams is running dry. AI might soften the pain of this people shortage, but ultimately it could make things worse.

It comes up in many conversations I have with network engineers and architects these days. They want AI-enhanced management tools.

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.

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.

I will soon publish new market research about enterprise network automation strategies. The report is based on a survey of 350+ IT professionals and one-on-one phone interviews with a dozen experts from a variety of well-known enterprises, universities, and government entities. 

This is a sponsored blog post.

With most companies now operating in multiple cloud providers, network and security complexity are increasing. For instance, 96% of multi-cloud enterprises are using more than one networking vendor across their cloud estates, according to new research from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

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.

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.