What does an Enterprise Network need to look like in 2025?

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In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, enterprises need to be ahead of the curve.

Modern-day networks should provide organisations with resilience, security and be an enabler for innovation. People expect to connect. The network is the backbone that holds all of IT together.

Here’s a glimpse into what your network should look like in 2025, and more importantly the outcomes it should be delivering…

Secure by Design

Security is fundamental. From threat detection to data protection, comprehensive security solutions are needed to safeguard your business. It is crucial to deploy a multi-layered security approach from a network access perspective, with solutions including firewalls, intrusion detection systems, Network Access Control, network segmentation and multi-factor authentication. Advanced threat intelligence and incident response services then add a layer to protect against emerging threats. By integrating security into every aspect of your network, and ensuring you have suitable visibility of the traffic, it ensures that your data and operations remain secure in an increasingly complex threat landscape.

Resiliency is Key

In an era where downtime carries a material impact to the bottom line, resiliency is non-negotiable. All networks should be designed to ensure continuous uptime, leveraging redundant pathways and quick failover mechanisms. Implementing multi-layered redundancy strategies, including dual power supplies, diverse network paths, and automated failover systems should be considered mandatory. As a point of principle, single points of failure should be avoided at all costs. This ensures that even in the event of a hardware failure or network disruption, your operations remain unaffected. Additionally, proactive monitoring should be implemented to help identify potential issues before they cause a business-impacting event.

Intent – Based Networking

Flexibility and efficiency are paramount. By embracing software-defined networks (SDN) and intent-based networking, enterprises decouple the control plane from the data plane, achieving greater scalability. SDN allows for centralised management and dynamic adjustment of network resources, enabling rapid deployment of new services and applications. Intent-based networking further enhances this by automating network management based on business intents, ensuring the network aligns with organisational goals. This approach not only reduces operational costs but also enhances network agility, allowing your business to quickly adapt to changing demands and market conditions. Greater scalability, agility, and productivity.

AI for Networks

AI is the game-changer. Organisations should be leveraging AI-native platforms for network optimisation, efficiencies, and enhanced security. AI-driven analytics can predict network congestion, optimise traffic flow, and detect anomalies in real-time, allowing for proactive management and swift resolution of issues. Furthermore, AI enhances security by identifying and mitigating threats before they can cause harm, ensuring that your network remains secure and efficient. Organisations not considering moving to an AI-native network are significantly increasing cyber risk and losing out on a plethora of productivity gains, these alone provide an ROI justification for utilisation a new AI-native network. Customers deploying their own AI solutions will need to think about Networks for AI, with a robust network infrastructure to handle the substantial data and bandwidth demands.

Securing & Managing IoT Devices

IoT devices require secure, efficient network integration to prevent cyber threats and ensure optimal performance. They should connect via encrypted protocols, with network segmentation to isolate them from critical systems. Zero Trust policies, role-based network access, and AI-driven anomaly detection enhance security. Businesses must also consider bandwidth demands, device authentication, and lifecycle management to maintain a resilient, scalable IoT infrastructure. This impacts every industry, as the digitisation of devices is accelerating at an exponential rate and hence, must be prioritised now more than ever.

The Power of Network Operations

Effective network operations are crucial for any enterprise to provide smooth day to day business operations. Such is the reliance on digitisation that any outage or problem can cause major issues quickly. Often, capability exists in the tool sets that are purchased, but not all of these get used meaning that the network isn’t operated in an optimal manner. Do your team members have the expertise to maximise ROI and toolset effectiveness? Additionally, is the network being operated and architected correctly? Many organisations could benefit from taking managed services, allowing a trusted partner to handle these types of tasks, ensuring optimal performance and freeing up internal resources for innovation.

Next-Gen Connectivity

Speed and accessibility are the future. With 5G and satellite connectivity, faster and more accessible networks are now available, ensuring seamless connectivity even in remote areas. 5G technology offers ultra-low latency and high bandwidth, supporting real-time applications such as video conferencing, IoT devices, and augmented reality. Satellite connectivity complements this by providing reliable internet access in areas where traditional terrestrial networks are unavailable or impractical, ensuring that your business remains connected no matter where it operates.

The Power of Network Operations

The Advent of Wi-Fi 7

Wi-Fi is now the preferred and primary method of connecting to the Network. An outdated wireless infrastructure can become a bottleneck, leading to a subpar user experience when accessing applications. Wi-Fi 7 is here to boost your network’s speed, reliability and capacity, ensuring it can handle increased device and user density. With advancements such as higher data rates, improved spectrum efficiency, and reduced latency, Wi-Fi 7 can support the growing number of connected devices and bandwidth-intensive applications. This ensures that your network can deliver consistent performance even in high-density environments.

Comprehensive Network Observability

Detecting and resolving issues swiftly is crucial. In today’s cloud centric world, you are reliant on utilising other network, meaning visibility across owned and unowned networks is important. Advanced monitoring tools offer real-time visibility into network performance, identifying potential bottlenecks and performance issues before they impact your operations. This holistic view of your network allows for proactive management, ensuring that your network remains efficient and reliable. Contemporary toolsets can be combined with AI-native networks, allowing continuous evolution and optimisation.

Cloud Ready WAN Architecture

Re-architecting the WAN for today’s Cloud environment and using the right transport connectivity, i.e. direct internet access. Users expect to be able to access any application, anywhere and anytime, with a perfect, frictionless experience. With many applications now being delivered from the Cloud, there are other networking considerations that need to be considered that differ from the traditional ways that networks operate.

Modern WAN solutions include intelligent routing, collective bandwidth, and automated failover mechanisms to ensure continuous connectivity. Real-time monitoring and analytics provide insights into network performance, allowing for quick identification and resolution of issues. This proactive approach minimises downtime and ensures that your business operations remain uninterrupted.

The advent of SD-WAN allows for multiple circuits to be utilised and optimal load balancing of traffic depending on traffic type to be implemented, maximising performance and ROI for WAN connectivity.