Skip to main content

EMA Announces New Research on Managing Networks in the Age of Cloud, SDN, and Big Data

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) released its latest research report entitled Managing Networks in the Age of Cloud, SDN, and Big Data: Network Management Megatrends 2014.

Based on research criteria defined by EMA Vice President of Research, Network Management, Jim Frey, and EMA Principal Research Analyst, Tracy Corbo, this new research study looks at the current state of networks and network management, and examines five major areas of change and evolution affecting network management. These areas are cloud and virtualization, Software Defined Networking (SDN), big data, the rise of log data and APIs as management data sources, and the ongoing convergence of network operations teams and tools.

The study also examines the context and influence that broader IT and organizational priorities and projects are having on network management priorities, as well as resulting requirements for network management products and solutions. The findings reveal the experiences and objectives that a broad range of organizations have had regarding network management, and thus should serve as a source of requirements and input for strategic network engineering and operations planning.

Some of the key findings in this study include:

- 80% of network engineers and managers are finding it necessary to learn new programming/scripting skills to keep up with increasing numbers of device and system APIs

- 80% of organizations are willing to consider consuming network management in a SaaS model

- 60%+ of organizations rely on log data analysis to support network monitoring, planning, and troubleshooting – more than any other data source.

- While the average organization uses 4-5 tools for network monitoring and troubleshooting, 1/3 of large organizations are using 11 or more tools, and some are using more than 25!

“The world of networks and network management are being rocked by disruptive trends such as cloud, SDN, and big data,” said Frey. “While network management is considered by many to be a mature discipline, our results indicate there is a lot of work remaining to accommodate these new initiatives and bring the network management into the cloud and big data era.”

Hot Topic

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

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 ...

EMA Announces New Research on Managing Networks in the Age of Cloud, SDN, and Big Data

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) released its latest research report entitled Managing Networks in the Age of Cloud, SDN, and Big Data: Network Management Megatrends 2014.

Based on research criteria defined by EMA Vice President of Research, Network Management, Jim Frey, and EMA Principal Research Analyst, Tracy Corbo, this new research study looks at the current state of networks and network management, and examines five major areas of change and evolution affecting network management. These areas are cloud and virtualization, Software Defined Networking (SDN), big data, the rise of log data and APIs as management data sources, and the ongoing convergence of network operations teams and tools.

The study also examines the context and influence that broader IT and organizational priorities and projects are having on network management priorities, as well as resulting requirements for network management products and solutions. The findings reveal the experiences and objectives that a broad range of organizations have had regarding network management, and thus should serve as a source of requirements and input for strategic network engineering and operations planning.

Some of the key findings in this study include:

- 80% of network engineers and managers are finding it necessary to learn new programming/scripting skills to keep up with increasing numbers of device and system APIs

- 80% of organizations are willing to consider consuming network management in a SaaS model

- 60%+ of organizations rely on log data analysis to support network monitoring, planning, and troubleshooting – more than any other data source.

- While the average organization uses 4-5 tools for network monitoring and troubleshooting, 1/3 of large organizations are using 11 or more tools, and some are using more than 25!

“The world of networks and network management are being rocked by disruptive trends such as cloud, SDN, and big data,” said Frey. “While network management is considered by many to be a mature discipline, our results indicate there is a lot of work remaining to accommodate these new initiatives and bring the network management into the cloud and big data era.”

Hot Topic

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

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 ...