As we move into 2025, the network and infrastructure landscape continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace. At NetBox Labs, we’ve had the privilege of engaging in hundreds of conversations with CXO and VP-level network and infrastructure leaders across industries. These discussions have revealed key trends and insights shaping the future of network and infrastructure management as we turn the page to 2025 and beyond. Here are five big takeaways from those conversations:
1. Operations: Data as the Foundation of Success
Data is the through-line in modernizing network and infrastructure operations. From the earliest stages of planning and design, through procurement, deployment, configuration, day-to-day operations, change management, and decommissioning, teams that organize their network and infrastructure data cohesively and consistently are poised for success.
Recent research from EMA found that organizations on their network automation journey consider data quality one of the top two requirements of their network management tooling, with data reconciliation and data model accuracy also considered critical.
These teams create internal alignment, avoid downstream mistakes, accelerate every step of the operational journey, and are equipped to apply modern practices for automation and security. By treating data as a strategic asset, they can do more with less, ensuring scalability and adaptability in an increasingly complex environment.
2. Observability: Aligning with Intent for Confidence and Speed
Teams that couple their network and infrastructure observability strategies with a source of truth that captures intent consistently outperform their peers. This alignment enables them to build better plans, operate with confidence, identify and resolve issues faster, enforce compliance, and answer strategic questions that matter.
Observability is multifaceted, encompassing:
- Measurement of operational state
- Identification and characterization of operational drift and compliance issues
- Real-time monitoring, alerting, and incident response
- Real-time telemetry
By integrating observability with a clear understanding of intent, organizations achieve greater control and agility of network changes and ensure cohesion across every mode of the observability strategy.
As one VP of Network Infrastructure at a European service provider said to me last week, “Our network monitoring is a mess and it’s a huge effort to keep our synthetic, telemetry, and protocol monitoring systems configured as our infrastructure changes.” Coupling observability tools with a source of truth automatically aligns observability with your infrastructure as it evolves.
3. Automation: The Step-by-Step Journey to Success
Automation is a journey, not a leap. Teams that attempt to dive straight into “big bang” automation initiatives from a traditional manual operations mindset often get overwhelmed and ultimately fail, burning investment dollars without achieving success. It’s a recipe for disaster to dive into automation without a clean dataset, a normalized, planned network and infrastructure strategy, and deployments that have been aligned to the data and strategy.
The most successful teams take a deliberate approach:
- Organize their data
- Address snowflakes and align the network with intent
- Start with small, successful automation use cases that provide learnings to scale
As our friends and collaborators at Ansible say in their article on the importance of network automation, “A ‘Start small, think big’ approach succeeds as it mitigates the risk while driving a cultural change among our customers.” A source of truth is critical as the lever for getting organized and making sense of your network and infrastructure data – check out our webinar on Why Network Automation Requires a Source of Truth for more insights on getting started.
This incremental strategy builds a foundation for success, enabling teams to expand automation confidently and effectively.
4. Security: Control as a Pillar of Resilience
Being in control of your network and infrastructure is critical to your organization’s security posture. Combining intent-based documentation and modeling with observability of operational state and identification of operational drift enhances every aspect of security:
- Reduces security surface area
- Improves compliance efforts
- Speeds time to resolution
- Streamlines threat hunting and vulnerability management
- Enriches day-to-day operations for security teams
Multiple reports from EMA in 2024 reinforce the importance of data for security strategy, finding that a source of truth is vital to compliance monitoring and that intent based network automation eliminates errors that might lead to security events.
Take the recent integration from our partner Sol1 between NetBox and the vulnerability management tool OpenVAS (now GVM), or the powerful combination from CISA and Idaho National Labs of NetBox with Corelight’s Zeek in their Malcolm project for threat identification and remediation. Intent based network data coupled with vulnerability or threat observability enhances security and reduces risk.
These patterns hold true across enterprise IT, service providers, IoT/OT, public sector, hybrid cloud, and more. Organizations in every sector are deploying NetBox to make sense of network and infrastructure data, with security often being a primary driver.
5. AI: Transformative, but Not Center Stage
AI is on every organization’s radar, but the real value lies in solving tangible business problems. While many network and infrastructure use cases are still in their infancy, the potential is enormous. Early implementations often involve simple ChatOps-like interfaces, but the true opportunity lies deeper.
“We’ve seen the chat bots,” said the network automation practice lead at one of our SI partners. “They’re exciting for a while, but they don’t stick. We want to invest in AI tooling and so do our customers, but we haven’t seen AI lead to real outcomes in AIOps or infrastructure management just yet.”
Teams are looking to:
- Accelerate and scale operations
- Speed decision-making and troubleshooting
- Proactively optimize infrastructure and prevent issues
AI will not be a “front-and-center” feature but rather an embedded capability. Well-applied narrow models in targeted use cases, agents, and operator workflows will enable teams to move faster and operate more strategically.
In 2025, these five themes – data-driven operations, aligned observability, incremental automation, secure control, and strategic AI – are defining the future of network and infrastructure management. At NetBox Labs, we’re excited to continue partnering with organizations to navigate these trends and help teams unlock their full potential. Our learnings from talking with hundreds of network and infrastructure leaders across our community, customers, and partners are driving our product strategy and reinforcing our conviction in the importance of a source of truth for networks and infrastructure. The road ahead is full of opportunities, and we can’t wait to see what’s next.
Learn how NetBox, the most popular network source of truth, can help you make sense of your network and delivery business value in 2025.
