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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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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 ...