Key Takeaways from the EMA Network Management Megatrends 2026

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has published its “Network Management Megatrends 2026” report, spotlighting automation, hybrid and multicloud networks, and artificial intelligence (AI) transformation. Published on a biennial basis since 2008, the “Network Management Megatrends” surveys IT professionals on how they manage, monitor, and troubleshoot modern enterprise networks. The report tracks and trends innovative operational practices and their evolution as technology, and now AI adoption, accelerates.

This year’s study includes responses from 352 IT professionals: 64.2 percent from North America (United States and Canada), and 35.8 percent from Europe (France, Germany, United Kingdom). More than 60 percent of the respondents work at organizations with more than 5,000 employees (24.1 percent had between 5,000 and 9,999, and 37.5 percent had more than 10,000). The top industries represented in the study included banking/financial services/insurance (25.9 percent), manufacturing (22.7 percent), retail/wholesale/distribution (12.5 percent), software/SaaS providers (12.2 percent), and health care/hospitals/life sciences (6.3 percent), with the balance represented by several other industries.

Study Overview

EMA includes several recurring questions in its study to highlight respondents’ systemic issues, improvements, and/or concerns related to troubleshooting, managing, and monitoring their networks. For instance, the most recent study included the question “How would you rate the success of your network operations organization over the past year?” Despite an upward trend in 2024, with 42 percent of participants believing their company’s overall network operations strategy was completely successful, the 2026 results reveal a downtrend, with only 31 percent of respondents indicating that their network teams were completely successful at monitoring and managing their networks.

Question: How would you rate the success of your network operations organization over the past year?

Critical Network Management Considerations

Some of the data and analysis from the 2026 “Network Management Megatrends” study cover critically important network management topics, including:

• Network operations strategy, toolset requirements and satisfaction, time spent on network troubleshooting, and use of war rooms
• Network operations data, data-collection challenges, and trust in the data
• Updates on hiring and retaining skilled network engineering professionals, and closing skills gaps
• Trends in AI adoption and NetOps transformations
• The impact of AI and machine learning (AI/ML) on network observability

Recent Outages Illuminate the Importance of Network Management

This report comes at a critical time, not only for the benefit of network operations but even more broadly for IT and executive leaders. Over the last two years, headline-making network outages have impacted some of the world’s largest, most well-established, network-savvy companies, including:

• Cloud providers
• SaaS applications
• Airlines
• Gaming platforms

The multihour, customer-impacting outages these organizations experienced were not caused by a security breach. Instead, they resulted from issues such as:

• Hardware failures
• Faulty software updates
• Misconfigurations
• Domain Name System (DNS) disruptions
• Network load balancer issues
• User authentication problems

These are common problems in major corporate networks that can trigger employee- and customer-impacting disruptions that last minutes, hours, or longer. The effects of these outages often cascade into major, long-lasting effects, including direct bottom-line consequences.

The 2026 “Network Management Megatrends” report offers critical insights based on four megatrends revealed by the survey that are shaping network engineer staffing, automation, hybrid and multicloud challenges, and preparing network observability for AI transformation. These megatrends, combined with additional strategies and tools shared in the report, can help IT organizations become more proactive, predictive, and preventive in their network performance management initiatives.

Learn more about the report’s findings and conclusions, including what’s influencing network operations teams and network management tool strategies, in the white paper “Network Management Megatrends 2026: Automation, Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Networks, and AI Transformation.”