Back to the Future: Why the Network is the Next IT Revolution

This week at Cisco Live 2016, the network has been the hot topic...

Yes, the network. Over the past few decades, the network has been dismissed as the legacy plumbing that is running underneath cutting edge infrastructure and applications. Folks thought it could be ignored - unless it went down.

But the humble network is really raising its profile at this show, as it should be.

The Network Administrator has endured numerous attacks on their role in IT organizations for too long. Disruptive technologies like Cloud and Software Defined Networking (SDN) have marginalized the network team's control as a business unit, with IT operations teams going around the network and setting their own policies of use.

Recognizing this forthcoming revolution during their tenures at F5 Networks, nine years ago ExtraHop co-founders, Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji had the foresight to make investments in building out a platform that could provide visibility across the entire application stack. The result was an agentless, massively scalable solution, that provides the level of visibility that organizations need and keeps pace with their growing, heterogeneous IT environments. Tapping into the network as the richest form of IT data, for years our customers have benefited from the ability to discover, explore and analyze all transactions streaming through the network, from L2 network data to L7, the coveted application layer.

This week at Cisco Live, this industry has gone back to the future. The next IT revolution is the network, pioneered by network engineers who hold the map and compass to reach complete IT visibility and control.

Jokes aside, we're glad to see IT professionals across multiple roles finally subscribing to what a select few have known all along, the fact that the ultimate source for data within your organization is the network itself. It's time to change the way you think about the network, and to acknowledge that it is more than just a transport layer. The network is a highway of information that can be mined in real time.

Network data, particularly network analytics, is on the tips of attendees' tongues at Cisco Live. The revolution of the network is hitting its stride, as more and more IT leaders realize that the richest source of data is coming from the network.

At ExtraHop, we'd like to introduce these pioneers to what Gartner has recognized as wire data. We also welcome all to learn more about the ExtraHop wire data platform, which brings complete visibility to the most massive and complex IT environments in the world, including Fortune 500 companies like Sony, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Adobe, and Google.

Want to see the power of leveraging network data in action? Check out our interactive online demo and customer case studies.