ExtraHop predicts explosive demand for IT visibility

Experts at ExtraHop offer the following predictions for IT in 2014:

1. Blunders by Universal Credit System and US Healthcare.gov force an IT reckoning.
The widely publicised failures at Natwest Bank, the ongoing IT issues behind the Universal Credit System, and the Healthcare.gov debacle in the United States are painful reminders that are forcing a reckoning for IT organisations across all market sectors, both public and private. The reality is that as technology and infrastructure grow increasingly complex, businesses must apply the same architectural approach to operations in the IT department that they do across the rest of the organisation. As we have seen with the Healthcare.gov website used to administer new US health insurance legislation, failure to do so can result in misspent Opex and Capex as well as a lack of insight into the performance, availability, and security of applications. In 2014, expect organisations to take the lessons of major IT projects, especially systems that need to scale to millions of users like Universal Credit or Healthcare.gov, to heart. The industry is seeing a move toward an IT operations architecture that leverages critical sources of data, including wire data, agent data, machine data, and synthetic data, to achieve comprehensive visibility across applications and infrastructure.

2. Incumbent Vendors Roil the Software-Defined Waters.
The move toward software-defined networks (SDN) and infrastructure—spearheaded by the OpenStack Foundation and a number of forward-thinking vendors such as Big Switch and Arista—has been heralded by many as the death of vendor lock-in. However, incumbent vendors such as Cisco are looking for ways to maintain a hardware-centric approach to SDN. Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure has an SDN controller that allows datacenter switches to act as a single fabric and enables the management of tens of thousands of ports from a centralised point, but it’s still built on a foundation of Cisco hardware. ExtraHop expects to see further expansion of the definition of SDN over the coming months as more vendors seek to include things like application delivery controllers (ADCs) and IP management.

3. Enterprises seek solutions for greater cloud confidence.
According to a recent Gartner survey, 80 percent of respondents stated that they plan to use cloud services in some form within the next 12 months, as compared to the 38 percent currently using cloud-based solutions. Despite growing curiosity about the cloud, there’s a big leap to be made between being cloud curious and cloud confident. Legacy solutions that monitor CPU usage alone simply do not deliver the broad visibility that is necessary before making the leap to the cloud. ExtraHop anticipates that over the next few years, the rate and degree of cloud adoption will rely heavily on solutions that can provide this deep visibility into the security, performance and availability, and maturity of cloud offerings—solutions that provide IT with the confidence they need to make the leap.

4. Organisations move to fix leaks in their security portfolios.
Last spring, Edward Snowden’s leak of classified CIA documents sent shock waves through the intelligence and security communities. How could a contractor have copied and stolen so much important data undetected? The Snowden leaks underscore a critical weakness in IT security: understanding what constitutes anomalous behaviour and being able to detect it early. This understanding and early recognition of anomalous behaviour is a crucial line of defence against a major breach. In 2014, ExtraHop expects to see growing recognition of advanced threats and the emergence of a new approach to defending against them. While traditional security solutions will remain a critical part of securing IT applications and infrastructure, pervasive monitoring across the entire IT architecture will be used to proactively identify emerging threats.

5. Big Data is not just for the marketing department.
Ask your average Joe what Big Data is, and you’ll likely get an answer that includes social media, mobile data, search patterns, and buying habits. While there’s been much ado over Big Data, the use case du jour has clearly been marketing. In 2014, expect to see that change. Of course, customer data gleaned from these channels is critical to building a competitive, successful business, but that shouldn’t overshadow the value that data and analytics can offer across the organisation. IT is poised to be the next major beneficiary of Big Data, with the emergence of tools that capture and analyse crucial sources of IT intelligence traversing the enterprise network, including machine data, agent data, wire data, and synthetic data. Just as search and social data has transformed marketing departments, Big Data analytics are poised to create a more efficient IT operations architecture.
“Today, information technology is central to the survival and success of businesses all over the globe,” said Jesse Rothstein, CEO, ExtraHop. “As these technologies become more sophisticated and line-of-business stakeholders demand rapid adoption, IT teams must take an operations-oriented, business-minded approach to deployment and management. In this way, IT organisations can ensure business-critical performance, availability, and security.”