5 Trends for the Hybrid Enterprise in 2015

Steve Riley
Learn more about Riverbed

The following are five trends regarding the hybrid enterprise in 2015 provided by Riverbed:

1. Network functions virtualization takes off, even without SDN

2015 will see continued development of SDN technologies, and buyer confusion will not abate as the incumbent switch and router vendors jockey for position. But NFV, already being widely deployed into service providers, will make its way into “classical” enterprise networks without the need for any SDN refresh (which, curiously, may require new hardware). Virtualized network functions allow organizations to dynamically provision networks wherever they’re needed, on an on-demand basis, independent of any underlying fabric.

2. Data breaches grow larger and more frequent

Unfortunately, the relentless pace of data breaches in 2014 will continue in 2015. Traditional security tactics, such as relying on “hardened” perimeters and rigid mobile device management will have little effect at slowing down the bad guys. Enterprises should shift investments and spend more on detection and response. Visibility across all applications, networks, and devices is the first critical step toward improving overall security posture. Establishing a baseline of what’s “normal” helps to better isolate actual threats and respond accordingly.

3. Hybrid architectures become the norm

Even though cloud computing and third party hosting will continue their rapid expansion, on-premise IT will remain a reality for 2015 and beyond. The resulting hybrid infrastructure stack will create challenges for most organizations ­including architectural “collisions,” where design patterns for on-premise development and deployment don’t translate well (or at all) into cloud. Working through these challenges will require more sophisticated models, policies, identity/access controls, and coding practices to ensure that end-user needs are met consistently across all platforms.

4. Decision-making becomes primarily driven by actionable analytics

As visibility, control, and optimization are brought to hybrid networks it will become increasingly important to construct an analytics-driven infrastructure that can take action when problems occur anywhere in the network. In 2015, more IT organizations will begin instrumenting network architectures with predictive analytics to create self-correcting, self-generating networks that respond to business needs and intents. This will be an ongoing trend starting in 2015.

5. Location transforms from a constraint into a feature

The technologies that will emerge in 2015 — ­full stack virtualization, pervasive visibility, and hybrid deployments — ­will create a form of infrastructure mobility that allows organizations to optimize for location of data, applications, and people. Regulatory policies that govern data locations will cease to become an impediment, and rapid access to that data will become possible for anyone, regardless of where they may happen to reside. Organizations that adopt these technologies will achieve new kinds of competitive advantages as a result.

Steve Riley is Technical Director, Office of CTO at Riverbed Technology.

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Why VM and Container Monitoring Is Not Enough for Cloud-Hosted Autonomous Agents

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Beyond Monitoring: Why IT Operations Must Evolve into Decision Operations

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...

5 Trends for the Hybrid Enterprise in 2015

Steve Riley
Learn more about Riverbed

The following are five trends regarding the hybrid enterprise in 2015 provided by Riverbed:

1. Network functions virtualization takes off, even without SDN

2015 will see continued development of SDN technologies, and buyer confusion will not abate as the incumbent switch and router vendors jockey for position. But NFV, already being widely deployed into service providers, will make its way into “classical” enterprise networks without the need for any SDN refresh (which, curiously, may require new hardware). Virtualized network functions allow organizations to dynamically provision networks wherever they’re needed, on an on-demand basis, independent of any underlying fabric.

2. Data breaches grow larger and more frequent

Unfortunately, the relentless pace of data breaches in 2014 will continue in 2015. Traditional security tactics, such as relying on “hardened” perimeters and rigid mobile device management will have little effect at slowing down the bad guys. Enterprises should shift investments and spend more on detection and response. Visibility across all applications, networks, and devices is the first critical step toward improving overall security posture. Establishing a baseline of what’s “normal” helps to better isolate actual threats and respond accordingly.

3. Hybrid architectures become the norm

Even though cloud computing and third party hosting will continue their rapid expansion, on-premise IT will remain a reality for 2015 and beyond. The resulting hybrid infrastructure stack will create challenges for most organizations ­including architectural “collisions,” where design patterns for on-premise development and deployment don’t translate well (or at all) into cloud. Working through these challenges will require more sophisticated models, policies, identity/access controls, and coding practices to ensure that end-user needs are met consistently across all platforms.

4. Decision-making becomes primarily driven by actionable analytics

As visibility, control, and optimization are brought to hybrid networks it will become increasingly important to construct an analytics-driven infrastructure that can take action when problems occur anywhere in the network. In 2015, more IT organizations will begin instrumenting network architectures with predictive analytics to create self-correcting, self-generating networks that respond to business needs and intents. This will be an ongoing trend starting in 2015.

5. Location transforms from a constraint into a feature

The technologies that will emerge in 2015 — ­full stack virtualization, pervasive visibility, and hybrid deployments — ­will create a form of infrastructure mobility that allows organizations to optimize for location of data, applications, and people. Regulatory policies that govern data locations will cease to become an impediment, and rapid access to that data will become possible for anyone, regardless of where they may happen to reside. Organizations that adopt these technologies will achieve new kinds of competitive advantages as a result.

Steve Riley is Technical Director, Office of CTO at Riverbed Technology.

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Why VM and Container Monitoring Is Not Enough for Cloud-Hosted Autonomous Agents

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Beyond Monitoring: Why IT Operations Must Evolve into Decision Operations

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...