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.

Related Links

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Three Strikes and They're Gone: Why Proactive Operations is Now a Customer Retention Strategy

IT organizations have historically measured success by how quickly they can respond when something goes wrong. The entire discipline of Incident Management has been optimized around mean time to resolution, first-response SLAs and ticket closure rates. But new research suggests that even though this is a well-executed playbook, it's no longer enough to retain customers ...

When the Database Is the Problem, Is APM Enough?

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

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Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

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The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

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As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

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The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

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The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

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