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Hybrid Cloud is Mainstream and Performance Management Software is Essential

Shamus McGillicuddy

Enterprises are aggressively deploying hybrid cloud infrastructure today, and the majority of them are deploying new network performance management software to support it.

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recently published its biannual network management megatrends research report, Network Management Megatrends 2016: Managing Networks in the Era of the Internet of Things, Hybrid Clouds and Advanced Network Analytics. For this research we surveyed 150 North American enterprise network management professionals, and as the title makes obvious we asked them how they are impacted by hybrid clouds, among other megatrends.

Thirty-five percent (35%) of them said that their organizations have completed a production hybrid cloud deployment. Another 35% said they are in the process of deploying a hybrid cloud today and 15% said they plan to go into production within 12 months. EMA defined a hybrid cloud as a combination of internal, private cloud infrastructure and external, public cloud infrastructure, with orchestration and connectivity across the two.

Performance monitoring is a critical technology for enterprises that are deploying or operating hybrid clouds. We asked them to identify which networking technologies they are adopting to support these environments. The number one response was network virtualization overlays (e.g. VMware NSX). The second most popular response was network performance monitoring and management software (51%).

We also asked research participants to identify the networking challenges they are facing with hybrid cloud. The number one challenge (30%) was the complexity of provisioning interconnections between public and private cloud environments. However, several other challenges emerged as nearly as common. For instance, 26% said they lacked end-to-end, multi-site network visibility and troubleshooting, and 26% said they struggled with network latency between internal and external cloud resources. Finally, 23% said that their applications were not properly architected for hybrid cloud networks. These latter three challenges point to potential application performance problems. Enterprises who are implementing hybrid clouds will need to evaluate the readiness of their performance management to support these new cloud environments. Many of them also clearly need to evaluate their application architectures before they migrate.

EMA's 2016 network megatrends research explored a number of other interesting topics that IT professionals will find informative. For instance, we found that the vast majority of network management professionals are supporting an Internet of Things (IoT) initiative. The research explores the technologies they are adopting, the use cases they are pursuing, and the challenges they are facing with IoT.

Nearly half of enterprises are applying advanced analytics to network data. And more than half are outsourcing some aspects of network management to a managed services provider. Our research explores both of these trends in depth. It also examines enterprises' evolving requirements of network management products and the overall challenges to and benefits of network operations success.

To learn more about this research, attend EMA's free research highlights webinar and download the full report.

Shamus McGillicuddy is Senior Analyst, Network Management at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

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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 ...

Hybrid Cloud is Mainstream and Performance Management Software is Essential

Shamus McGillicuddy

Enterprises are aggressively deploying hybrid cloud infrastructure today, and the majority of them are deploying new network performance management software to support it.

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recently published its biannual network management megatrends research report, Network Management Megatrends 2016: Managing Networks in the Era of the Internet of Things, Hybrid Clouds and Advanced Network Analytics. For this research we surveyed 150 North American enterprise network management professionals, and as the title makes obvious we asked them how they are impacted by hybrid clouds, among other megatrends.

Thirty-five percent (35%) of them said that their organizations have completed a production hybrid cloud deployment. Another 35% said they are in the process of deploying a hybrid cloud today and 15% said they plan to go into production within 12 months. EMA defined a hybrid cloud as a combination of internal, private cloud infrastructure and external, public cloud infrastructure, with orchestration and connectivity across the two.

Performance monitoring is a critical technology for enterprises that are deploying or operating hybrid clouds. We asked them to identify which networking technologies they are adopting to support these environments. The number one response was network virtualization overlays (e.g. VMware NSX). The second most popular response was network performance monitoring and management software (51%).

We also asked research participants to identify the networking challenges they are facing with hybrid cloud. The number one challenge (30%) was the complexity of provisioning interconnections between public and private cloud environments. However, several other challenges emerged as nearly as common. For instance, 26% said they lacked end-to-end, multi-site network visibility and troubleshooting, and 26% said they struggled with network latency between internal and external cloud resources. Finally, 23% said that their applications were not properly architected for hybrid cloud networks. These latter three challenges point to potential application performance problems. Enterprises who are implementing hybrid clouds will need to evaluate the readiness of their performance management to support these new cloud environments. Many of them also clearly need to evaluate their application architectures before they migrate.

EMA's 2016 network megatrends research explored a number of other interesting topics that IT professionals will find informative. For instance, we found that the vast majority of network management professionals are supporting an Internet of Things (IoT) initiative. The research explores the technologies they are adopting, the use cases they are pursuing, and the challenges they are facing with IoT.

Nearly half of enterprises are applying advanced analytics to network data. And more than half are outsourcing some aspects of network management to a managed services provider. Our research explores both of these trends in depth. It also examines enterprises' evolving requirements of network management products and the overall challenges to and benefits of network operations success.

To learn more about this research, attend EMA's free research highlights webinar and download the full report.

Shamus McGillicuddy is Senior Analyst, Network Management at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

Hot Topics

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 ...