2023 was a vital year for enterprises as they had to navigate a world of uncertainty coming out of a global pandemic and determine what their new normal would look like. While this is an ongoing puzzle for many to solve, it’s clear that remote work and, in turn, the cloud, is going to play a bigger role for enterprises for years to come. Figuring out how many days a week employees should come to the office, if at all, is not the issue enterprises need to be concerned with the most. Rather, with reliance on the cloud continuing to increase, enterprises should be asking themselves how they can maximize these cloud environments to become tomorrow’s leaders.
On top of all of this, Artificial Intelligence (AI) became the “it” technology of the year, promising to change everything as we know it. Although the developments we’ve seen from the technology over the last 12 months are impressive, its current limitations within the enterprise should be a reason to pause. Before banking on AI to solve all problems in 2024, enterprises need to carefully consider what it can and cannot do reliably to help their businesses grow.
As we peer ahead to 2024, here are some key trends shaping our industry.
#1: The Future of Enterprise Networking Lies in On-Demand, Scalable As-a-Service Models
Today’s enterprises move at blazing speeds, making traditional approaches to networking exponentially obsolete. Enterprises are relying more heavily than ever on IaaS and SaaS applications to keep up with ever-changing customer demands, and there are no signs of this trend slowing down. 2023 was a significant year for the growth of cloud-based, as-a-service delivery models, and now that these models are core components to how enterprises operate, they’re only going to become more valuable over time. The rigid networking approach of yesteryear simply cannot keep up with the pace that today’s consumer moves at, and it’s extremely costly to try. With shrinking staffs and budgets, IT leaders are demanding as-a-service networking solutions because they are easy to use and cost effective, while increasing agility and network performance. Based on what we’ve seen over the last 12 months, it’s evident that Network and Network Infrastructure as-as-a service is the future of enterprise networking. Enterprises want to consume the network infrastructure that is always available to them and build and manage networks on top of that infrastructure. From an enterprise perspective, it’s all about virtualization.
#2: Network Operations Get a Boost From AI
AI is a transformational technology, but oftentimes the hype and the potential outweigh the reality. Can it increase speed and production in the modern enterprise? Yes, possibly, but would you let it roam free and make all your critical business decisions tomorrow? Probably not. As it relates to enterprise networking in 2024, AI won’t be able to handle everything effectively, but it will play a key role on the operations side. AIOps, or the use of AI to automate and streamline IT operations tasks, is going to be the leading use case for AI in networking in 2024. With its ability to quickly make meaning out of fragmented data, AIOps will be helpful for tasks such as anomaly detection, which will enable enterprises to identify the root cause of an incident much faster than before. This will allow them to resolve issues before they impact network performance and security, which will have a positive effect on overall output. While AI will be a tool that more networking professionals will rely on this year, we’re still FAR FROM AI handling network provisioning on its own. Networks are too crucial to the success of an enterprise for them to hand over the keys to AI to completely automate the entire network. At this time, the risk - which could mean millions of dollars lost per hour - is not worth the reward. Those that have the properly trained networking experts, who can closely monitor and understand all the real-time decisions AI is making, have an opportunity to set themselves up for future success with AI, but again, that’s a long-term endeavor that won’t happen overnight.
#3: Fewer Tools, Integrated Teams
Enterprises have reached the point where they realize that adding more Band-Aids to their network, cloud, and security infrastructure is only going to hurt them in the long run. As such, enterprises are making a concerted effort to consolidate their tools in favor of end-to-end platforms. This trend will accelerate in 2024 as enterprises also look to reduce costs, increase performance and efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction. Currently, most enterprises spend countless hours logging in and out of different point solutions to achieve simple tasks, when they could be reducing operational friction with centralized platforms that have been designed and optimized for modern enterprise workloads. As more enterprises see what’s possible with fewer network management tools, adoption rates for platform solutions will skyrocket.
Beyond the elimination of tool sprawl, there will also be further convergence between network, cloud, and security teams in 2024, who will work closer together to solve higher order challenges that are emerging in the enterprise. No longer is networking just about connecting two points - it’s becoming extremely complex, where cloud is involved and security is expected to be integrated inside of the network. With fewer silos and fewer tools to navigate, enterprises will be able to address issues quickly and build stronger, more resilient networks overall.
