Lines of business are making their voices heard by NetOps and other IT teams, as agility, business performance, and security now trump cost and network management as top concerns, Cisco’s latest Global Networking Trends Report finds.

The networking giant surveyed over 2,500 IT decision-makers across 13 countries and found respondents identifying more scalable and agile application development (42%), managing security (42%), best-of-breed services and applications (41%), and business agility (40%) are key motivations for multicloud transition.

“The idea of line of business influencing NetOps has been discussed for a few years now, but this report is the first time we’re seeing evidence in the data,” Daryl Coon, solutions marketing manager at Cisco, wrote in an email to SDxCentral.

Even though the physical to digital-only engagement with employees and customers has eased over the past years, “The network still plays an oversized role in business continuity,” he added. “So, while cost will always be a consideration, business agility and application performance are now the most important measures of network operations.”

The report also showed that 56% of surveyed cloud and networking professionals picked security as the top networking challenge when managing hybrid and distributed workloads. Security concerns are rooted in complexity, Coon pointed out. In fact, 53% of respondents cited the complexity of end-to-end management challenges as the top challenge in the survey.

Supporting that stat, half of those surveyed rated end-to-end visibility as the most-wanted technology tool, followed by multicloud SDN.

“For the report, end-to-end visibility was defined as visibility from the user to the workload—across the network, internet, and cloud,” Coon explained. “Many of our security practices are rooted in visibility – it is incredibly difficult to manage and secure something you can’t see. Hybrid cloud security and end-to-end visibility go hand-in-hand.”

In addition to the increasing importance of business outcomes and complexity as the key concern for IT teams, the survey showed that on-premise infrastructure is still a major consideration for CloudOps, NetOps, and DevOps, he noted, adding half of participants said their organizations are still deploying 50% of their workloads on-premise.

Cisco’s report also showed that the top four objectives of CloudOps and NetOps respondents were exactly the same, according to Coon.

For example, 42% of NetOps and 49% of CloudOps respondents chose security as their top motivation for using multicloud, while 45% of all the surveyed say improving cloud security is their main motivation for increasing collaboration, according to the report.

“When we compared the current objectives of CloudOps and NetOps with those of previous years, there was substantially greater alignment in the current data,” Coon said.