Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024.  Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Cloud, Network, and Security Investments Pay Off

By Atif Khan, Chief Technology Officer, Alkira

2023 has been a year of notable changes in the networking space, setting the stage for an eventful 2024. With more enterprises experimenting with AI, increasing their reliance on the cloud, reaching a breaking point with tool sprawl, and realizing that previously siloed teams need to work together to solve today's toughest challenges, 2024 will be a year marked by simplicity, speed, production, and enhanced cloud security.

• The Top Use Case for AI in Cloud Networking is AIOps
• The AI wave has arrived and is impacting every industry in several ways, raising the bar for speed and production in the enterprise. One of the initial AI use cases in networking is on the operations side where AI will play a big role in helping with operating networks on daily basis. AIOps, which is the use of AI to automate and streamline IT operations tasks, is going to be one of the top use cases for AI in the networking space in 2024. When it comes to networking, every capability needs to be tightly integrated, and AIOps makes meaning out of all the disparate information floating around. In particular, this is going to be critical for anomaly detection, which can help enterprises quickly identify the root cause of an incident, so they can resolve it before there's any damage to their network. Although AI will be a helpful tool for networking in 2024, we're still far from AI handling network provisioning on its own. Networks are mission-critical, so using AI to automate an entire network is still too risky, especially if you don't have the right personnel to monitor it and understand all the real-time decisions it's making. An enterprise can lose millions of dollars in an hour if they don't know where an issue happened. It is going to be a while before AI takes over the provisioning of the networks.

• The As-a-Service Model Will Take Off in Enterprise Networking
• 2023 has been a turning point for cloud-based, as-a-service delivery models, which enterprises are realizing is just as easy to consume as all the other SaaS applications they have come to rely on. We've seen firsthand how much interest has soared over the last 12 months, and it is clear that this is the future of the networking space. Customers have been raving about the ease of use, cost savings, and increased agility and performance that this model delivers, compared to traditional networking where organizations had to purchase, install, and manage their own network infrastructure. With shrinking staffs and IT leaders being asked to do more with less (yet again!), the as-a-service model for networking is going to continue to be a vital component for the next generation of enterprise success. Network and Network Infrastructure as-as-a service is the future of networking. Enterprises want to consume the network infrastructure that is always available to them and build and manage networks on top of that infrastructure. It's all about virtualization from an enterprise perspective.

• Cloud Traffic Will Increase and Data Center Traffic Will Remain Flat
• Today, the majority of enterprise traffic is going towards IaaS and SaaS applications, with no signs of this trend slowing down. According to Gartner, "there is sufficient spending within data center markets to maintain existing on-premises data centers, but new spending has shifted to cloud options." In other words, physical data centers will continue to exist, but they will stop growing. The cloud, on the other hand, will continue to grow, as will the need for data to stay in private networks. With so much traffic now going to the cloud, it will be imperative for cloud providers to extend their footprints as close to end users as possible. Even for organizations that are relying on one cloud provider, they require a private network for each region they're in. Networks need to be properly set up for the way traffic patterns are shifting.

• Consolidation of Network Management Tools
• One of the top customer and prospect pain points we've been hearing from enterprises in recent months is that they feel overwhelmed by the number of tools they have to navigate to manage their networks. Moving forward, we expect enterprises will actively try and eliminate tool sprawl by consolidating their network management tools with more end-to-end platforms. Doing this effectively addresses several goals that corporate boards are laying out for enterprises, including cost reduction, increased performance, and higher customer satisfaction. Currently, the majority of enterprises are wasting precious time logging in and out of different point solutions to achieve basic tasks, when they could be reducing operational friction by using a centralized platform that has been designed and optimized for modern enterprise workloads. As more enterprises see what's on the other side of their tangled web of network management tools, adoption rates for platform solutions will grow quickly.

• The Convergence of Network, Cloud, and Security Teams will Accelerate
• In today's day and age, networking is no longer just about connecting point A to point B. It's become a lot more complex, where cloud is involved and security is expected to be integrated inside of the network. We are moving away from the days where network, cloud, and security teams function in their own silos. These teams now have to be fully connected, working in unison to solve today's toughest challenges, and enterprises are beginning to realize this on a larger scale.      

2024 is poised to be an exciting year for enterprises. Cloud, network, and security technologies are maturing and playing a bigger role for IT leaders on a daily basis, giving them a clearer picture of the health of their networks in real-time, while allowing them to make informed decisions more quickly, more easily, and with less friction. Moving forward, these significant developments will empower IT leaders to go from a defensive mindset to a growth mindset, where they're using IT as a differentiator and a key source for business growth.

I look forward to a strong close to 2023 and an even stronger start to 2024.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Atif Khan is a renowned routing expert with extensive experience bringing ground-breaking networking solutions to market and in architecting some of the largest and most sophisticated global networks. He is responsible for Alkira's technology vision and overall engineering and product development of Alkira Cloud Services Exchange. Atif was VP Technology and Solutions, and a founding team member at Viptela, where he developed a world-class, cloud-first, highly scalable SD-WAN solution with advanced routing, segmentation, and security capabilities. Following the Viptela acquisition, Atif was Senior Director of the Enterprise Networking Business at Cisco.