Research Objectives
Organizations are distributing applications across private data centers, multiple public clouds, and edge locations. Plus, hybrid work initiatives are enabling employees to work from home or other locations outside of traditional office settings. As a result, the network has become critical to ensuring secure connectivity. These modern, distributed networks create greater challenges for organizations as they can create blind spots and become operationally complex to effectively manage. In addition, organizations are exploring the use of new technologies that drive visibility, efficiency, and automation.
To better understand how organizations are addressing end-to-end network visibility and management as well as adopting new technologies to drive greater operational efficiencies, Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 339 IT and networking professionals responsible for network operations, architecture, and management at organizations in North America (US and Canada).
This study sought to answer the following questions:
- Approximately how many unique public cloud infrastructure service providers do organizations currently use?
- Approximately how many remote offices/branch offices do organizations operate worldwide today, and how do they expect this to change over the next 24 months?
- Approximately what percentage of organizations’ total employees are roaming users, and how do they expect this to change over the next 24 months?
- What is the breakdown of where production applications and workloads run today, and how is this expected to change over the next 24 months?
- What are the biggest reasons that organizations believe end-to-end network environments have become more complex?
- How important do organizations believe it is to have unified end-to-end visibility of network environments? Why is unified end-to-end visibility viewed as important?
- What challenges have organizations encountered, or what concerns do they have, with unifying network visibility capabilities? What benefits have organizations achieved, or do they expect to achieve, by unifying their end-to-end network visibility capabilities?
- How important do organizations believe it is to have unified end-to-end management of network environments? Why is unified end-to-end management viewed as important?
- What challenges have organizations encountered, or what concerns do they have, with unifying network management capabilities? What benefits have organizations achieved, or do they expect to achieve, by unifying their end-to-end network management capabilities?
- How important is digital twin technology, or will it be, for the visibility and management of organizations’ end-to-end network environments?
- To what extent are organizations using network automation technology? To what extent do organizations’ network automation solutions leverage AI/ML capabilities?
- In which network domains are organizations currently using, or planning to use, network automation? What are, or likely will be, the most common uses for network automation?
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, technology, financial services, and retail/wholesale. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.
