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Companies Embrace AIOps as Strategic Imperative

Businesses are embracing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to improve network performance and security, according to a new State of AIOps Study, conducted by ZK Research and Masergy.


The survey results demonstrate strong AIOps (AI for IT Operations) technology adoption rates and reveal a heightened level of confidence and trust as companies invest in AI to make their IT operations smarter, faster, and more secure.

"While digital transformation was already in motion prior to the pandemic, work-from-home (WFH) business models demand a whole new level of application performance and security measures to power and protect multi-cloud and hybrid work environments with no physical boundaries," said Terry Traina, CTO of Masergy. "The study reinforces that we are at a pivotal moment where automation and AIOps are no longer a nice to have but rather a strategic imperative for successful, secure business operations."

Key findings from the survey include:

More than half (64%) of companies surveyed are already using AIOps, with 55% using it across both network and security.

Moreover, 94% believe it is important or very important for AIOps to manage network and cloud application performance.

With more employees using third-party cloud applications from numerous locations and devices, IT leaders, tasked with securing corporate information everywhere, can't afford to trade WFH flexibility and performance for security. In fact, they are using AIOps to help manage those tradeoffs. The reasons companies use AIOps are tightly intertwined with network operational efficiencies, faster security threat identification, and faster security threat response reported as the top three.

"The vast majority of IT leaders have already embraced AIOps, and they're pointing to benefits such as productivity, cloud application performance, and security improvements," said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst, ZK Research. "Clearly, the business value of AIOps is justified. The era of AIOps is here, and anyone without a strategy will quickly be left behind."

More than two-thirds (73%) of survey participants identified software-defined network modernization and virtualization as the top IT investment required to prepare for AIOps. Today's businesses see SD-WAN's virtualization and orchestration benefits valuable in managing distributed networks and security policies. In fact, most businesses are putting more assets in the cloud, with 67% citing cloud migration as another top investment making them AI-ready.

A resounding majority (84%) see AIOps as the path to a fully automated network environment, with 86% expecting to have a fully automated network within 5 years.

Asked about the confidence they have in trusting AIOps tools to act on their own recommendations and create fully automated systems, 97% of respondents are confident they can be trusted.

Additionally 77% agree that AIOps performs better with a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture, where SD-WAN and security are all in one platform.

"A new wave of opportunity comes when SASE and AIOps unite in a single solution," said Traina. "IT executives need overarching insights where AI is deeply embedded into a unified platform, and this is precisely how Masergy is helping our customers transform with certainty."

Methodology: ZK Research conducted the study in August 2021 on behalf of Masergy, surveying more than 500 IT decision makers in US headquartered businesses across seven industries.

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Companies Embrace AIOps as Strategic Imperative

Businesses are embracing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to improve network performance and security, according to a new State of AIOps Study, conducted by ZK Research and Masergy.


The survey results demonstrate strong AIOps (AI for IT Operations) technology adoption rates and reveal a heightened level of confidence and trust as companies invest in AI to make their IT operations smarter, faster, and more secure.

"While digital transformation was already in motion prior to the pandemic, work-from-home (WFH) business models demand a whole new level of application performance and security measures to power and protect multi-cloud and hybrid work environments with no physical boundaries," said Terry Traina, CTO of Masergy. "The study reinforces that we are at a pivotal moment where automation and AIOps are no longer a nice to have but rather a strategic imperative for successful, secure business operations."

Key findings from the survey include:

More than half (64%) of companies surveyed are already using AIOps, with 55% using it across both network and security.

Moreover, 94% believe it is important or very important for AIOps to manage network and cloud application performance.

With more employees using third-party cloud applications from numerous locations and devices, IT leaders, tasked with securing corporate information everywhere, can't afford to trade WFH flexibility and performance for security. In fact, they are using AIOps to help manage those tradeoffs. The reasons companies use AIOps are tightly intertwined with network operational efficiencies, faster security threat identification, and faster security threat response reported as the top three.

"The vast majority of IT leaders have already embraced AIOps, and they're pointing to benefits such as productivity, cloud application performance, and security improvements," said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst, ZK Research. "Clearly, the business value of AIOps is justified. The era of AIOps is here, and anyone without a strategy will quickly be left behind."

More than two-thirds (73%) of survey participants identified software-defined network modernization and virtualization as the top IT investment required to prepare for AIOps. Today's businesses see SD-WAN's virtualization and orchestration benefits valuable in managing distributed networks and security policies. In fact, most businesses are putting more assets in the cloud, with 67% citing cloud migration as another top investment making them AI-ready.

A resounding majority (84%) see AIOps as the path to a fully automated network environment, with 86% expecting to have a fully automated network within 5 years.

Asked about the confidence they have in trusting AIOps tools to act on their own recommendations and create fully automated systems, 97% of respondents are confident they can be trusted.

Additionally 77% agree that AIOps performs better with a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture, where SD-WAN and security are all in one platform.

"A new wave of opportunity comes when SASE and AIOps unite in a single solution," said Traina. "IT executives need overarching insights where AI is deeply embedded into a unified platform, and this is precisely how Masergy is helping our customers transform with certainty."

Methodology: ZK Research conducted the study in August 2021 on behalf of Masergy, surveying more than 500 IT decision makers in US headquartered businesses across seven industries.

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...