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The Evolving Role of Network Professionals

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Increasingly diverse demands from next generation technologies is changing the role of network professionals, according to the 2016 Network World State of the Network study by IDG’s Network World.

Among enterprises, nearly all survey respondents (91%) noted the increased demands of the position, and while the role might be becoming more complex, the majority see a more integral responsibility in shaping IT strategy (71%). In fact, 65% stated that communication between the CIO and the networking management team is happening more frequently than ever before. Communication enterprise-wide is also proving to be critical to digital-enabled business innovation. Seventy-nine percent agreed that collaboration efforts between the network team and other teams within IT are successful in driving innovation. Looking beyond IT, the networking group works with top business executives on at least a monthly basis, according to 69% of respondents and collaborates at a similar frequency with corporate operations (66%).

“The network has always been the backbone of the enterprise,” said Brian Glynn, Chief Revenue Officer of IDG Enterprise. “We are now seeing the team behind the network taking a larger role in IT strategy and collaboration across the business, which is important as companies continue to respond to digital disruption, drive innovation around emerging tech, and digitally transform their business.”

Other highlights of the survey:

■ 51% of enterprise respondents indicated their IT budget will increase over the next 12 months, with more than one-third (38%) saying it will remain the same.

■ 55% cite network speed and performance as the top business driver for networking investments. This is followed by improving data security (53%) and ensuring availability (50%).

■ These drivers correlate to the areas that respondents say will receive increased budget allocation – cloud (63%), network security (50%), and data storage (43%).

■ Security areas being most actively looked into include enterprise mobility management (57%), securing access for mobility programs (54%), ID management solutions (54%), securing access to social media (52%), data loss prevention (52%), next-generation firewalls (52%), and corporate data encryption (50%).

■ 70% say cloud will add complexity, while at the same time nearly the same amount (69%) stated cloud will enable the networking team to play a more strategic role.

■ 48% of enterprise organizations are actively researching plans around SDN and 9% are piloting software-defined networking (SDN) technology. And 22% plan to be piloting the technology a year from now.

■ 20% of enterprise organizations have Internet of Things (IoT) efforts underway and an additional 43% plan to implement IoT efforts within the next three years.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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The Evolving Role of Network Professionals

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Increasingly diverse demands from next generation technologies is changing the role of network professionals, according to the 2016 Network World State of the Network study by IDG’s Network World.

Among enterprises, nearly all survey respondents (91%) noted the increased demands of the position, and while the role might be becoming more complex, the majority see a more integral responsibility in shaping IT strategy (71%). In fact, 65% stated that communication between the CIO and the networking management team is happening more frequently than ever before. Communication enterprise-wide is also proving to be critical to digital-enabled business innovation. Seventy-nine percent agreed that collaboration efforts between the network team and other teams within IT are successful in driving innovation. Looking beyond IT, the networking group works with top business executives on at least a monthly basis, according to 69% of respondents and collaborates at a similar frequency with corporate operations (66%).

“The network has always been the backbone of the enterprise,” said Brian Glynn, Chief Revenue Officer of IDG Enterprise. “We are now seeing the team behind the network taking a larger role in IT strategy and collaboration across the business, which is important as companies continue to respond to digital disruption, drive innovation around emerging tech, and digitally transform their business.”

Other highlights of the survey:

■ 51% of enterprise respondents indicated their IT budget will increase over the next 12 months, with more than one-third (38%) saying it will remain the same.

■ 55% cite network speed and performance as the top business driver for networking investments. This is followed by improving data security (53%) and ensuring availability (50%).

■ These drivers correlate to the areas that respondents say will receive increased budget allocation – cloud (63%), network security (50%), and data storage (43%).

■ Security areas being most actively looked into include enterprise mobility management (57%), securing access for mobility programs (54%), ID management solutions (54%), securing access to social media (52%), data loss prevention (52%), next-generation firewalls (52%), and corporate data encryption (50%).

■ 70% say cloud will add complexity, while at the same time nearly the same amount (69%) stated cloud will enable the networking team to play a more strategic role.

■ 48% of enterprise organizations are actively researching plans around SDN and 9% are piloting software-defined networking (SDN) technology. And 22% plan to be piloting the technology a year from now.

■ 20% of enterprise organizations have Internet of Things (IoT) efforts underway and an additional 43% plan to implement IoT efforts within the next three years.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

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44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

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