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 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.

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.

Everyone wants to talk about how analytics is the future of network engineering and operations. The phrase “network analytics” is used by vendors of various stripes to imply that a particular technology is smarter and better than the average solution.