EMA Research Blog: Navigating IT and Security Horizons

Enterprise networking professionals have a cloud problem, even if they don’t know it. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) solutions can help them solve this problem.

Despite what you hear from trolls, bigots, and misogynists, diversity in the technology industry is a good thing. But the philosophy of diversity needs more champions. Tech companies and IT organizations need to expand their workforce beyond the herds of white men that have dominated the industry for decades.

Despite some recent obituaries published by my peers, software-defined networking is not dead. But perhaps certain aspects of it are dead or dying. If that’s the case, I say: “SDN is dead. Long live SDN.”

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.

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.

Champions of big data analytics extoll the virtues of massive data stores. Enterprises have so much unstructured data that could help them improve operations and generate new revenue, they say. The more bytes, the better. Some might assume that enterprises will simply push every byte they can find into a Hadoop cluster or data warehouse. [...]