Network Professionals Are

Reshaping IT Strategy
How Emerging Technologies, Budgets & Investments,
and Security Influence the Network Role

The Network Role is Evolving

79% 82% 71%

feel that the role of the agree that collaboration agree that the network
networking professional is between the network team and management team is
becoming more strategic/ other IT teams is successful in communicating with the
business oriented driving innovation CIO more than ever before

84% 69% 84%

of network professionals say the network management of network professionals
are initiating team is communicating with expect their job to become
collaboration efforts LOB more than ever before more challenging

What’s Transforming the Network?

Emerging Technologies

56% 63% 69% 64% 63%

76%
73%

of networking
professionals have plans
for Edge Computing
have plans to implement
hyperconverged
infrastructure
(increases to 73% for
enterprise organizations)
have plans to implement have plans for SDN have plans for SD-WAN
converged infrastructure technology technology
(increases to 76% for
enterprise organizations)

EDGE COMPUTING: HYPERCONVERGED CONVERGED SOFTWARE-DEFINED SD-WAN TECHNOLOGY:

INFRASTRUCTURE: INFRASTRUCTURE: NETWORKING (SDN):
Edge Computing allows Software-centric A hardware-centric, Involves the decoupling Enables you to augment
the processing of architecture that integrates building block of the network's control existing MPLS—
information to be compute, storage, infrastructure approach and data forwarding multi-protocol label (a WAN
performed closer to virtualization (hypervisor), that integrates compute planes, and enables technology where a user has
where it is being and management on and other components automated full control over traffic
collected/generated. commodity hardware that’s such as storage and provisioning, network engineering) links—with
This is fundamentally supported by a single servers on commodity programmability, lower cost Internet, Ethernet
changing the network vendor. Since hardware supported by service chaining, and or wireless alternatives, and
by letting organizations Hyperconverged a single vendor. In a integration with cloud balance the traffic across the
analyze important data Infrastructure is converged system, the orchestration systems. mix based on priority,
in near real-time. software-defined, the components can be availability, performance, etc.
components are essentially broken apart and used
10 integrated and cannot be
%
on their own.
separated.

Budgets & Investments

Average IT Budget

$137 million
(up $12M from 2017)
43%
expect their organization’s total IT budget to
increase over the next 12 months

Technology areas expecting an 2017 Primary Drivers for

2018
increase in budget allocation Network Investments

69% Ensuring Availability

(uptime) 53%
61 %
61 %
60 %
55% 55% Improving Data
53%
50% 47% Security
43 %
Improving Network
Speed/Performance 53%
Ensuring Business
Continuity 51%
Network Application Cloud Machine Analytics/Data
Security Development Services Learning Management Improving Customer
(new for 2018) Experience 45%

Securing the Network

82% 60% of network professionals say that network

security is their primary area of responsibility
say the network team is spending more time on
security initiatives today than in years past
69% say that the network management team finds it
challenging to balance availability vs. a secure network

What are the top challenges related to security and access to data?

#
1 Maintaining network
security while assuring
#
2 Protecting
against data
#
3 Ensuring availability
(uptime)
network connectivity breaches/leaks

Current and Future Network-Security Initiatives Budget Increases for Security Related Tools
On the radar/actively researching
Network Security 61%

36% Compliance 46%

33% 32%
Disaster Recovery 42%

IT Governance 37%
Data Loss Corporate ID Management Business
Prevention Data Encryption Solutions Continuity 36%

View additional IDG research on technology trends and IT decision-maker insight. Source: 2018 State of the Network Survey, Network World #StateoftheNetwork | @NetworkWorld @IDGWorld
IDG Communications, Inc.