If you thought BYOD was a pain the neck for IT management, strap yourself in.

The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the enterprise is moving beyond the hype into a much more pragmatic and operational phase of planning, execution and service delivery.

There’s massive interest and buzz around IoT within companies of every type. This is largely due to the transformative business impact IoT will have. Major business will be transformed, disrupted or out completely when IoT is properly used in the business transformation process.

But with IoT solutions comes new demands and a wide range of technologies, many of which will take the enterprise into unfamiliar territory, requiring different analytical skills and management tools. In other words, IoT devices quickly finding their way into to the enterprise will make life a living hell for network managers – far beyond the problems they experienced with BYOD.

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A recent Gartner report on network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD) estimated the market to a whopping $2.1 billion and growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.9 percent, with more growth in sight. Wow. So what will drive this growth and why?

New approaches to harvesting network data using sophisticated big data analytics techniques combined with cloud computing and machine learning technologies is the answer. This perfect confluence of technologies is poised to redefine the conventional infrastructure management market.

Central to this shift is the use of analytics technologies and strategies to extract new insights and value from data produced by and collected from the network to drive business value.

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Troubleshooting WiFi problems has been the bane of the network engineer’s existence for nearly a decade. So often these problems go undiagnosed that clients have even since stopped reporting them. Bad WiFi chalked up as just part of everyday life.

Yet the role enterprise WLAN plays has literally become a critical part of an ever-growing ecosystem of both end user and IoT devices. Add to that the technology advancements in 802.11 and the task of maintaining a reliable WiFi network has become nearly out of reach of the average WLAN engineer. To solve this conundrum WLAN vendors, have a long history of attempting to solve the problem with hardware sensors and detailed active site surveys.

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Nowhere is there more pain for IT staff than in the ever-morphing healthcare market where the Internet of Things (IoT) has been gaining attention and traction.

The concept of IoT involves the use of electronic devices that capture or monitor data and are connected via wireless to a private or public cloud, enabling them to automatically trigger certain events. 

In the healthcare context, a growing set of IoT devices have been introduced to patients and medical staff in various forms. Whether wireless bedside monitors, infusion pumps, or even voice/data-based clinician communication devices, the result is means better and more efficient patient care.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are two of the latest networking buzzwords being thrown around the industry. The problem is many enterprise network managers remain confused about the real value of these vastly useful technologies.

Emerging network analytics services, powered by AI and machine learning promise to transform traditional infrastructure management models by simplifying operations, lowering costs, and giving unprecedented insights into the user experience – improving the productivity of both IT professionals and their users.

For network staff, the concept and value of these technologies is extremely powerful if applied to the right problems.

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When enterprises started moving workloads and applications to the public cloud, it made sense to adapt existing networking technologies to the new domain. But while compute and storage have successfully become ‘cloud-like,’ networking hasn't.

Cloud networking solutions being offered by companies including Aviatrix, Cisco, and Juniper Network are all vying to help organizations solve networking challenges when transforming their infrastructure to public cloud. But as cloud implementations become more complex, it’s becoming clear that cloud connectivity solutions based on virtualized datacenter networking technologies lack the agility and elasticity required to   build and scale in the public cloud.

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1. Whether your users are happy (without having to talk to them)

It’s not always cool to admit, but the ultimate goal of every networker is to have happy users. Like many other thankless jobs, we only hear about problems. When we do, we react. But that isn’t ideal. What we really want is to know about problems as they are developing, before users complain. They don't even have to know.  But we do.

A Network Management System (NMS) has been the traditional go-to solution to sniff out these sorts of problems. But most were designed for just one view of a certain part of the network using antiquated technology that doesn't provide any sort of predictive problem solving based on what the user is actually experiencing. It's like trying to figure out San Francisco traffic based on the status of the traffic signals. Just because the signals are working properly doesn’t mean the drivers (users) are having a good experience.

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The way we manage and monitor networks is morphing. 

Passive, reactive tools are being replaced by more proactive network analytics systems that give the entire network team a single source of truth about network behavior and a much deeper understanding of where infrastructure issues are hiding and what to do about them.

Before IT was forever changed by the arrival of mobile devices, virtualization and cloud apps, fixing network problems was relatively simple because users plugged into the network from one location to access local applications and resources.

But with the proliferation of diverse wireless clients – a range of hardware using different versions of different operating systems (the permutations can quickly scale into the thousands) – and the use of applications and services that are often not under IT’s control, getting to the heart of individual user and systemic client network problems has become the new nightmare.

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Every vendor today is spewing about the importance of managing the user experience. What this actually means, however, remains a mystery to most, and there are precious few approaches available to help you get a handle on the issue.

Good and predictable user experience is no longer negotiable in this age of constant online business communications. Computer networks have effectively become the single most important tool driving corporate productivity.

But user experience is one of the most difficult problems to address, especially on enterprise access networks, because each experience is influenced by a long list of moving parts, many of which are increasingly outside the control of IT. 

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Throughput testing has long been regarded as the best way to find great Wi-Fi products, validate WLAN design and troubleshoot user Wi-Fi issues.  

It's not. 

Wi-Fi throughput testing generates a single data point under a specific scenario in a highly dynamic environment. That's it. In today's enterprise network environment, we need a lot more than that.

+RELATED: What is MU-MIMO and can it boost Wi-Fi capacity?+

It’s tempting, for example, to use Wi-Fi throughput tests to evaluate vendor equipment by determining the maximum TCP data rate (or speed) that, say, an access point can achieve with one or more client devices concurrently connected. But these tests don’t really reflect reality because you won’t see how that equipment really measures up until you have the network fully loaded and deployed.

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