Based on insight from customers, partners, and industry analysts and insiders, ExtraHop expects to see the network emerge as a critical nexus of business over the next twelve months, with significant integration between network and security, demand for operational support of connected devices, and the ability to mine all data-in-motion for correlated, cross-tier and cross-team insights.
Leaders at ExtraHop offer the following predictions for IT in 2016:
1. The Network Administrator Transcends the Realm of the Network
"When server virtualization started to gain market traction, the role of the server admin went through a transformation, transitioning from physical to virtual server administration, and eventually leading orchestration and automation for enterprise IT. 2016 is the year that the network administrator role is going to see a similar transformation. Everything – all network, client, application, and business data – flows over the network, making it an incredibly powerful source of insight. As the keepers of this data flow, network admins have the opportunity to take on a broader, more strategic role in the enterprise."
Erik Giesa, SVP of Marketing and Business Development for ExtraHop
2. Network Monitoring and Security Architectures Converge over East-West Traffic
"As many organizations have learned the hard way over the past few years, securing the perimeter is not enough. Visibility into anomalous activity and potential threats inside the environment, all of the East-West traffic, is going to play a central role in security moving forward. To that end, 2016 will see the convergence of security and network monitoring. Security will no longer stand alone, but be integrated into infrastructure, optimization, and monitoring products."
Jesse Rothstein, Co-Founder and CEO at ExtraHop
3. Orchestration Vendors Achieve Differentiation Through Insight
"Orchestration platforms are at a crucial inflection point. Actioning capability has matured to the point that it is no longer a market differentiator. In the coming year, forward-thinking orchestration and automation vendors will shift their focus from invoking actions to the insights used to trigger those actions, and in the process move from a reactive stance to a proactive, smart approach."
Raja Mukerji, Co-Founder and President at ExtraHop
4. Monitoring-Aware Networks Come Online
"SDN has matured significantly over the past few years, and among our customers and others we're starting to see it gain real traction. The next evolution of SDN is monitoring-aware networks. As demand for greater visibility into these networks escalates, expect to see hardware-agnostic vendors build commodity capture interfaces directly into device firmwares, enabling much easier, more agile monitoring of these complex and dynamic architectures."
Eric Thomas, Director of Solutions Architecture at ExtraHop
5. Accelerating Cloud Adoption Drives Consolidation
"Market pressures that cloud computing has wrought on the industry will continue to impact entrenched IT vendors in 2016. The Dell acquisition of EMC is only the beginning. Expect to see other major enterprise IT players look to consolidation as the impacts of cloud reverberate through their business."
Brian Young is Sr. Director of Business Development for ExtraHop
6. Healthcare IT Zeroes in on IoT
"The healthcare industry has a vast number of connected devices, from insulin and drug pumps, to MRI machines, to tablet computers used by clinicians in patient care. While some of these devices are very sophisticated, others are still using protocols like Telnet. This, combined with the shear number of devices, means that traditional monitoring approaches like instrumentation, are untenable. In 2016, expect to see more budget dollars go to solutions that provide the visibility necessary to align IT and clinical operations in support of healthcare IoT."
John Matthews is CIO at ExtraHop
Erik Giesa is SVP of Marketing and Business Development for ExtraHop.