Network Management Megatrends 2018: Cloud, Security, and Automation Dominate Enterprise Networking
The “Network Management Megatrends” report is a biennial research project that examines the state of enterprise network management. This ongoing Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) project tracks the evolution of network management tool requirements, organizational strategies and drivers, and operational challenges. It also identifies and explores megatrends that impact network management decision-making.
The 2018 “Network Management Megatrends” report is based on a survey of 250 North American and European IT professionals who are directly involved in network management. The results will be published this spring. This column offers a preview of our findings.
The Cloud is Saturating Enterprise Networks
EMA found that the average enterprise can trace 45 percent of all traffic on its network to external cloud services, such as IaaS- and SaaS-based applications. The research also revealed that public cloud initiatives are the No. 3 technical initiative driving network management priorities, trailing only software-defined data centers and server virtualization. This cloud migration will challenge network managers, who will struggle to manage the availability and performance of cloud-based applications. The enterprise has little to no administrative control over cloud environments, so network managers can’t monitor the cloud like they monitor their enterprise networks. For instance, they can’t pull metrics from a cloud provider’s network via SNMP polling. New tools are needed. In fact, 58 percent of network managers told EMA that they are acquiring new tools for monitoring and troubleshooting eternal cloud services.
Perhaps this is why active test monitoring tools, which can inject synthetic traffic into an external cloud resource to emulate application performance and end-user experience, are extremely popular with network managers right now. The megatrends research polls network managers every two years about the data sources they use for network management tasks. The results usually reflect tools that are trending upward at a given moment. For instance, log files were extremely popular in 2014 when Splunk and other log analytics vendors were enjoying tremendous hype. This year, network test traffic emerged as the top monitoring data source, tied with management system APIs, which are also useful for cloud monitoring.
Network and Security Operations Convergence
EMA’s “Network Management Megatrends” research found evidence that network and security management teams are moving closer together. Forty percent of research participants reported that their network and security management teams are fully converged with shared tools and processes. Another 51 percent maintain separate teams with formalized tools and processes for collaboration.
According to EMA’s research, network and security teams are converging because enterprises are looking for opportunities to drive cost efficiencies in operational expenses, reduce security risks, and accelerate incident response. Furthermore, this research found that network managers cite security incidents as a leading root cause of complex service problems that require cross-team collaboration.
Network Automation is Expanding
Ninety-three percent of network managers in this research have an initiative to expand their use of network automation, and 70 percent said this initiative is a high priority. Network automation has been around for a long time, but until recently, it took the form of single-use custom scripts or network configuration management systems that focus primarily on device provisioning and change control.
Today is a much different story. For instance, the top three aspects of networking that enterprises want to automate today are network optimization, security incident response, and network capacity planning. Change and configuration management is near the bottom of their list of priorities.
On the other hand, network change and configuration management systems are the second-most popular tools that network managers are using to expand automation. Software-defined networking (SDN) solutions and software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) were first and third, respectively.
Countless Other Insights in the Full Report
The insights listed above are just a sample of the data and analysis available in the full report, which exceeds 60 pages. Download the Megatrends research to get a full understanding of emerging network management tool requirements, organizational strategies, operational challenges, and more.
