Market trends

• Current market trends • Challenges and implications

Current market trends

Complexity. IT architectures have become, and will remain, more complex. Organizations operate across on-premises and cloud environments to deploy applications and services across distributed environments and meet user needs. Research from Enterprise Services Group (ESG) identified the top ten networking challenges¹ today, and three pertain to cloud-related operations.

Hybrid work models change connectivity requirements from hundreds of locations to tens of thousands, adding complexity to networks.
The mix of private and public networks creates challenges for organizations to observe or optimize traffic for remote workers using internet connections.
Organizations are still learning how to effectively support highly dynamic environments distributed across public clouds, private data centers, and edge environments, with applications leveraging microservices and containers.

User experience. Businesses want to accelerate their digital transformation journeys and innovate with confidence. Yet they face ongoing challenges in monitoring performance, maintaining visibility, ensuring security, and providing an enhanced user experience. Today’s users do not tolerate bad digital experiences; they are quick to blame the brand of the application, regardless of who or what is responsible. Fifty-seven percent of users say that brands have one shot to impress them, and if a digital service doesn’t perform, then they won’t use it again.

Cybersecurity. Security remains a top priority for organizations.

Cybersecurity investment in 2021 was 2x higher than the prior year.²
Organizations average 12+ different security tools from multiple vendors.³

With these and other challenges, IT departments continue to struggle with balancing demands, supporting users, and implementing new technologies to support change.

1 “Network Modernization in Highly Distributed Environments,” ESG research report, November 2021.
2 “State of the Industry: Where is Cybersecurity Headed in 2022?” Secure World, February 10, 2022.
3 “Security Outcomes Study, Volume 1,” Cisco, 2021.

Challenges and
implications

To address current market challenges and remain competitive, organizations need to be digitally driven. This includes establishing the following:

Deep visibility across all environments
Real-time insight into service availability
Ongoing monitoring of network health metrics and
business-specific KPIs

Brand reputation is defined by the quality of users’ digital experiences. Your applications are the front door to a digital landscape that continues to evolve and grow in scale and complexity. With more interdependencies, data, clouds, and providers, organizations cannot manage their IT environments from isolated monitoring islands. You need observability across all environments, even those not in your organization’s control.

To establish agility and innovate with confidence, you need a seamless and secure architecture. You need technology solutions that are simple to adopt, operate, manage, and
monitor—delivered from trusted and experienced technology partners. To support your customers, these solutions need to scale across multiple environments and deliver consistent network performance.