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Network Management Megatrends 2022

Shamus McGillicuddy

Network operations teams are trying to establish partnerships with DevOps teams, but the process isn't easy.

The DevOps team tends to focus on the deployment and quality of applications while the network operations team focuses on network monitoring and management. While the two groups have different priorities, they see opportunities to help each other.

In its recently published Network Management Megatrends 2022 research report, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) found that 93% of companies with a DevOps group have aligned or plan to align it closely with their network operations group. In fact, 38% expect these two groups to merge into a single unit. Another 55% expect them to establish formalized partnerships with deep collaboration.

"Our network monitoring team has team members who attend all DevOps meetings," said an IT operations manager for one of the world's largest government agencies. "It's going okay. The network monitoring team is always hammering the DevOps team, telling them they need to set up more monitoring. It goes over to varying degrees of success. DevOps always says, ‘We have customers to deal with. This can wait.' It's not at the top of their list."

Collaboration Opportunities for NetOps and DevOps

EMA's Megatrends report, based on a survey of 409 IT professionals, found three important areas of collaboration for network and DevOps groups.

1. Security policy design/implementation (51%). Network operations professionals have often told EMA that they find DevOps and CloudOps professionals to be less sophisticated with security policies. This leads to vulnerabilities and compliance violations that undermine application rollouts. A strong partnership allows the network operations team to bring its security expertise to the table and set up DevOps for success.

2. Application optimization/fail-fast iteration (42%). DevOps teams often optimize applications through a fail-fast approach, which encourages rapid iterations of application deployments where failure is expected and used as an opportunity to improve overall application design. This process requires good observability capabilities. It can also have significant impact on the network. One network engineer once told me that his DevOps team rolled out an application that was initially so inefficient in how it maintained a cache of directory information that it brought down the network every morning. He had to use packet analysis to get to the root of the problem. On the bright side, his discovery of the problem helped the DevOps team to optimize the application.

3. Network capacity planning (41%). Network operations teams need to know how the network will be used in the future to optimize network capacity. They usually do this by analyzing trends in their network monitoring tools. However, a closer relationship with DevOps could provide them more insight into how a company's application portfolio is going to evolve over time.

EMA's research found secondary interest in collaboration around application planning and design (36%) and operational monitoring (36%). Members of DevOps teams in EMA's survey were especially interested in monitoring collaboration, suggesting that the network monitoring toolset can improve overall observability for the DevOps team.

Roadblocks to Partnerships

Nothing is ever easy. And building network operations and DevOps partnerships is no exception. The Megatrends research identify five key challenges to bringing these two groups together.

1. Cross-team skills gaps (41%). These groups work with different technologies and use different tools to manage those technologies. In many cases, they is very little overlap in specialized skills. As a network security architect with a large bank told me: "They only come together when it's a proven need, and it's out of necessity due to there not being a ton of cross-training. The traditional network guys don't know a lot about the cloud."

2. Lack of tool integration (37%). Tool integrations are essential to breaking down silos. By sharing data and reports across tools, DevOps and network operations can start to understand each other's worlds and make decisions together.

3. Budget limitations (34%). Money makes the world go around. It takes money to train people, integrate tools, and devote time to building out processes for collaboration.

4. Lack of best practices and policies (33%). Many IT organizations rely on industry standard best practices to establish policies, procedures, and tooling. Such best practices are slow to establish standards in new territory, such as collaboration between these two groups. It's unknown territory for many industry experts.

5. Divided technology leadership (33%). This last issue is a tricky one. Basically, a third of research respondents told us that the DevOps team does not report up to a traditional CIO's office like network operations does. It is difficult to steer a ship with two captains. Collaboration between these silos will require collaboration at the executive level, too.

Build These Partnerships Today

Some naysayers may be unconvinced about the value of this collaboration. EMA research disagrees. In our analysis of survey data, we found that successful network operations teams are the most likely to completely erase silos between DevOps and network operations. Unsuccessful teams tend to keep more daylight between these groups. EMA believes that deep partnerships between these groups is a potential best practice moving forward.

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Network Management Megatrends 2022

Shamus McGillicuddy

Network operations teams are trying to establish partnerships with DevOps teams, but the process isn't easy.

The DevOps team tends to focus on the deployment and quality of applications while the network operations team focuses on network monitoring and management. While the two groups have different priorities, they see opportunities to help each other.

In its recently published Network Management Megatrends 2022 research report, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) found that 93% of companies with a DevOps group have aligned or plan to align it closely with their network operations group. In fact, 38% expect these two groups to merge into a single unit. Another 55% expect them to establish formalized partnerships with deep collaboration.

"Our network monitoring team has team members who attend all DevOps meetings," said an IT operations manager for one of the world's largest government agencies. "It's going okay. The network monitoring team is always hammering the DevOps team, telling them they need to set up more monitoring. It goes over to varying degrees of success. DevOps always says, ‘We have customers to deal with. This can wait.' It's not at the top of their list."

Collaboration Opportunities for NetOps and DevOps

EMA's Megatrends report, based on a survey of 409 IT professionals, found three important areas of collaboration for network and DevOps groups.

1. Security policy design/implementation (51%). Network operations professionals have often told EMA that they find DevOps and CloudOps professionals to be less sophisticated with security policies. This leads to vulnerabilities and compliance violations that undermine application rollouts. A strong partnership allows the network operations team to bring its security expertise to the table and set up DevOps for success.

2. Application optimization/fail-fast iteration (42%). DevOps teams often optimize applications through a fail-fast approach, which encourages rapid iterations of application deployments where failure is expected and used as an opportunity to improve overall application design. This process requires good observability capabilities. It can also have significant impact on the network. One network engineer once told me that his DevOps team rolled out an application that was initially so inefficient in how it maintained a cache of directory information that it brought down the network every morning. He had to use packet analysis to get to the root of the problem. On the bright side, his discovery of the problem helped the DevOps team to optimize the application.

3. Network capacity planning (41%). Network operations teams need to know how the network will be used in the future to optimize network capacity. They usually do this by analyzing trends in their network monitoring tools. However, a closer relationship with DevOps could provide them more insight into how a company's application portfolio is going to evolve over time.

EMA's research found secondary interest in collaboration around application planning and design (36%) and operational monitoring (36%). Members of DevOps teams in EMA's survey were especially interested in monitoring collaboration, suggesting that the network monitoring toolset can improve overall observability for the DevOps team.

Roadblocks to Partnerships

Nothing is ever easy. And building network operations and DevOps partnerships is no exception. The Megatrends research identify five key challenges to bringing these two groups together.

1. Cross-team skills gaps (41%). These groups work with different technologies and use different tools to manage those technologies. In many cases, they is very little overlap in specialized skills. As a network security architect with a large bank told me: "They only come together when it's a proven need, and it's out of necessity due to there not being a ton of cross-training. The traditional network guys don't know a lot about the cloud."

2. Lack of tool integration (37%). Tool integrations are essential to breaking down silos. By sharing data and reports across tools, DevOps and network operations can start to understand each other's worlds and make decisions together.

3. Budget limitations (34%). Money makes the world go around. It takes money to train people, integrate tools, and devote time to building out processes for collaboration.

4. Lack of best practices and policies (33%). Many IT organizations rely on industry standard best practices to establish policies, procedures, and tooling. Such best practices are slow to establish standards in new territory, such as collaboration between these two groups. It's unknown territory for many industry experts.

5. Divided technology leadership (33%). This last issue is a tricky one. Basically, a third of research respondents told us that the DevOps team does not report up to a traditional CIO's office like network operations does. It is difficult to steer a ship with two captains. Collaboration between these silos will require collaboration at the executive level, too.

Build These Partnerships Today

Some naysayers may be unconvinced about the value of this collaboration. EMA research disagrees. In our analysis of survey data, we found that successful network operations teams are the most likely to completely erase silos between DevOps and network operations. Unsuccessful teams tend to keep more daylight between these groups. EMA believes that deep partnerships between these groups is a potential best practice moving forward.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...