Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Michael Segal, VP of Strategy at NETSCOUT

2019: The Year that Digital Transformation Finally Comes Together

Today's organizations rely on technology and strategies such as the flexibility and versatility of the hybrid cloud, the speed of automation, and the innovation of using machine learning. To stay relevant during the digital transformation, organizations will continue to embrace these technologies and approaches for the benefits they bring, but will also have to handle the new challenges associated with these innovations.

In 2019, the adoption and growth of hybrid and multi-cloud environments will continue, with workloads and services increasingly moving back and forth between on-premise and in the cloud. In order to properly leverage the benefits of this approach, 2019 is the year that hybrid and multi-cloud environments will demand holistic and continuous monitoring and management.

Technologies and strategies such as SD-WAN and the CI/CD process bring increased operational efficiencies to businesses in the form of enhanced speed and agility to execute infrastructure plans. In 2019, monitoring the health and security of these automated services will be a necessity, and smart data will be critical in making this happen.

Machine learning has played a big role in the digital transformation. In 2019, there will be in an increase in the importance and influence of smart data being used as a training set for machine learning. Today's organizations have the ability to collect data from multiple environments. If they organize this data to be smart and relevant, it can be leveraged for machine training purposes and provide insight when it comes to security, service performance, and user experience. The more effective the data, the more effective the machine learning algorithms will become.

Finally, in 2019, the ability to process data at the source will become critical. By deploying lightweight agents at the edge, organizations will be able to extend their management capabilities to the edge and make this process a reality.

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About the Author

Michael Segal serves as Vice President of Strategy at NETSCOUT, where he is responsible for market research, enterprise solutions marketing, analyst relations, customer advocacy, analyst relations, advertising, and social marketing.