EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

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.

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.

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.