Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018. Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Ron Lifton, Senior Enterprise Solutions Manager, NETSCOUT
Smart data, virtualization and rapid transformation
With DX affecting
businesses of all shapes and sizes and showing no signs of slowing down, Ron
Lifton, Senior Enterprise Solutions Manager, NETSCOUT, discusses the predicted changes
as organizations shift their focus from physical assets, in favor of digital
services and a data-driven business model:
According
to 451 Research, more than one-third of IT Professionals have ‘moving faster'
as their top goal for 2018. Furthermore, in NETSCOUT's recent Digital
Transformation (DX) survey, an overwhelming 99% of IT and business decision
makers recognized an increasing pace of change in today's connected world. For companies looking to
compete in the digital economy, this pace of
transformation is being
driven by their customers and requires speedy software releases, agility
through cloud services, and automation.
As
such, DevOps teams and IT organizations have been tasked with accelerating the
development and deployment of applications, whilst maintaining quality and
cutting costs: two particularly juxtaposing responsibilities.
In
2017 we've seen an increasing number of businesses
moving their applications to the cloud and delivering services through
virtualized data centers. This is going to extend into 2018 and beyond, with
virtualization itself growing into the clouds with off-premise data centers and
SD-WAN.
The challenge is therefore whether IT
organizations can deliver business value using these technologies. Continuous
monitoring with a 360 view of business services will allow departments to
quickly identify current or potential problems.
As such, a service assurance and security
strategy based on smart data must provide a top-down detailed picture of the IT
environment to truly understand what is really happening with applications and
services, both in real-time and historically. Applications and services
leveraging innovative technologies like cloud and IoT are only as good as the
visibility IT teams have of the entire infrastructure. Focus and investment on
understanding service and application dependencies will therefore reduce
business risk.
In 2018, we expect to
witness businesses delivering on the digital economy's goal of faster, more
efficient industries. It will be up to businesses to facilitate this change
using the cloud and IoT, allowing for service agility and flexibility. However,
end-to-end service, application and infrastructure monitoring will grow in
strategic importance as companies scale at ‘blistering pace.' Getting these
things right and planning for 2018 will help maintain business velocity
throughout the DX, and we look forward to supporting this activity next year.
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About
the Author
Ron
Lifton, Senior Enterprise Solutions Manager, NETSCOUT
Ron has many years of enterprise and service provider marketing
experience at several companies, including startups and a Fortune 100 company.
He is currently a senior solutions marketing manager responsible for
positioning NetScout service
assurance solutions for the enterprise market. Prior to NetScout, Ron headed
product management for a cybersecurity solution that applies machine learning
and behavioral analytics to network traffic flows. He has previously held
senior marketing positions within Cisco and drove outbound marketing programs
for network management products.