Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025. Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Ken
Rutsky, CMO, Aryaka
AI adoption,
hybrid work, growing cybersecurity threats, and other macro trends have swiftly
reshaped the technology landscape. This is all having a massive impact at the
infrastructure level – particularly at the network layer. In 2025,
organizations will make major changes in how they approach networking to
mitigate these challenges and continue to advance their businesses in a rapidly
changing IT world.
I’ve spoken to
my colleagues at Aryaka, and here’s how we see it all shaking out.
Increasing
platformization drives network and security modernization
I was chatting
with Aryaka Chief Product Officer Renuka Nadkarni, and she sees a major wave of
platformization coming in networking and security next year. Legacy networking
and security architectures optimized for point-to-point connectivity are not
able to cope with the highly dynamic and distributed nature of users and
applications.
“With hybrid
work firmly established as the new norm, networks are only getting more and
more highly distributed. Furthermore, organizations are aggressively leveraging
AI to drive new business efficiencies. These trends are making networks far
more complex, meaning they’re much more difficult to manage and secure.
Enterprises are finding that in this changing environment, traditional point
solutions aren’t sufficient for running and protecting their networks. They’re
also suffering from an increasing resource and skills gap in both areas that’s
exacerbating the issue.
“To address
this challenge next year,” Renuka continued. “More enterprises will modernize
their network and security architecture by converging the two. Converged
networks and security are far easier to operate, optimize, observe, and secure
than when they’re siloed.”
AI’s
networking challenges come to the forefront
Aditya K. Sood,
Aryaka VP of Security Engineering and AI Strategy, is an expert on artificial
intelligence’s impact on the network. He recently pointed out to me that while
enterprises deploying artificial intelligence are well aware of the business,
safety, skills, and technical challenges associated with AI, most of them
haven’t thought much about AI’s networking challenges. Aditya insists that will
change next year.
“AI apps put
much greater strain on the network. They typically move significant quantities
of data across long distances, and usually have to do it quickly to support
rapid decision making. As a result, these AI workloads need a lot more
bandwidth and other resources to deliver sufficient performance and work
properly. There are also security challenges: AI adoption introduces new attack
surfaces and other potential vulnerabilities into a network,” Aditya told me.
He went on to
say how he predicts this will shake out: “As organizations move AI apps into
production, they’ll come head-to-head with these networking hurdles and realize
they need an answer to safely achieve the results they’re expecting from
artificial intelligence. If they don’t acknowledge and address AI’s networking
challenges, they’ll be scrambling reactively for a solution to support these
deployments – for example, shipping disc storage via FedEx and UPS to their
datacenters across the country to help support AI data transfer demands.”
2025 will
usher in a new era of intelligent network security
Finally, here’s
my own prediction for 2025. Network security is only getting trickier, with all
sorts of new attack vectors and threats emerging. Bad actors have gotten
increasingly sophisticated, while enterprises haven’t progressed as quickly in
their security capabilities. The accelerating gap between attacker and defender
resources will manifest a few different trends in 2025. First, we will see a
growing dependence on AI for cybersecurity. Second, there will be increased
outsourcing to skilled managed services for network security. Finally, there
will be massive consolidation and convergence of solutions to drive simplicity,
efficiency and effectiveness of network security and networking.
An
Opportunity to Advance the Network by Leaps and Bounds
Organizations are facing some of the biggest
network and network security challenges we’ve seen in the last decade. But emerging
technologies and strategies – namely, the ability to converge networking and
security – provides an opportunity for enterprises to overcome these hurdles and
create a safer and more efficient organization at the infrastructure level.
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ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
As Chief
Marketing Officer, Ken is responsible for worldwide marketing strategy,
programs and execution to build Aryaka’s leadership position and go to market
success. Ken is a Silicon Valley marketing leader with a proven ability
to build categories and brands and drive business growth. His experience spans
industry giants like Intel, Netscape and McAfee, where he drove the marketing
that put the Secure Web Gateway business on a trajectory to grow from $50
million to over $300 million in just three years.
