For most of my career, the conversation I walked into was about connectivity. Reliability, performance, and global reach. Making sure your people and your sites could actually talk to each other without the network slowing everything down.
For decades, enterprise security operated on a manageable division of labor. IT owned the servers, laptops, the network. Operations owned the warehouse, the fleet, and the factory floor. These worlds were physically separated. The assumption was that if the machines on the plant floor couldn’t talk to the corporate network, they couldn’t become a corporate problem.
A warehouse manager at a large US distribution company needs smart forklifts. She sources them, gets procurement approval, and installs them. Good decision, and the right operational call. The forklifts have embedded SIM cards. They connect over a cellular network. They are now inside your environment.
Your security team wasn’t involved at the point of activation, even if policy exists on paper. Your network team didn’t onboard or validate the device.
And this isn’t a one-off. Multiply this across sensors, cameras, kiosks, scanners, and third-party integrations. The pattern is the same. Things connect. Data moves. Decisions get automated. And nobody owns the moment where that connection becomes risk.
The Problem Isn’t New
If we’re honest, this kind of gap has been around for years. Unmanaged access, inconsistent policy enforcement, devices and integrations that slipped in outside the formal process.
The gaps were there, uncomfortable, inconvenient, but never painful enough to force action. The complexity made it easy to ignore, like an itch you got used to.
Now you’ve got more devices coming online without going through IT. More data moving between systems that were never designed to work together. And more actions being triggered automatically, whether that’s scripts, integrations, or AI tools, without the level of oversight you think you have.
Now, it’s not just the occasional device slipping in. You’ve got a flood of connected devices, IoT everywhere, moving data across your environment at a scale that’s hard to track, let alone control. The board is pushing to adopt AI, but they’re also asking, “What are you doing to keep this secure?”
And that same forklift — it doesn’t just sit on the edge anymore. It feeds data into systems, triggers workflows, and connects to a wider environment.
Physical vs. Invisible
The forklift is just the version you can see.
IoT makes the risk visible because it shows up in physical devices. AI makes the same problem harder to see because it moves through software, workflows, and model behavior.
The harder version of this problem is software. The average organization is now running 66 GenAI applications, according to Palo Alto Networks, often without central visibility or control.
Most of them weren’t procured through IT. A developer connected an agent. A marketing team signed up for a writing tool. A sales manager automated a workflow. All good operational calls. All the same governance gap as the forklift, but moving faster and leaving fewer footprints.
The question isn’t whether your people should be using AI. They should. The question is whether you actually know what’s connecting to your environment and what it has access to. For most organizations, the honest answer is no.
This isn’t just a process issue or a missed handoff. It’s structural.
The Architecture Conversation Nobody’s Having
Here’s what I’ve learned sitting across from security and network leaders over the past few years: the companies that are genuinely in a good position aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated tools. They’re the ones that made a deliberate decision about architecture. They stopped treating connectivity and security as separate line items managed by separate teams and started asking a harder question: do these pieces actually work together?
Most don’t. Not because the tools are bad, but because they were never designed to. Each vendor solved their problem. Nobody was accountable for the seams between them.
The shift we’re seeing, and the one we’ve been building toward at Globalgig, is away from that fragmented model and toward something that treats the network as the foundation for security, not a parallel track running beside it. SASE, when it’s actually implemented as an architecture rather than another layer bolted on top, is what makes that possible: security policy enforced at the network level, consistently, across every user and every site, without requiring your teams to stitch together six different dashboards to understand what’s happening.
It’s a harder sell than connectivity, I’ll admit — more stakeholders, more interconnected decisions. Connectivity has clear metrics. Security architecture is different. When it’s working, it’s quiet. No incident, no disruption. The real issue is that security failure rarely starts as one big event. It starts as a series of small decisions that made sense at the time.
What I’d Ask if I Were Sitting in Your Chair
If you’re a CEO, CFO, or CIO reading this, I’m not suggesting you need to understand every layer of your environment.
Even with a strong CISO in place, this isn’t something that sits neatly within one function.
What I’d ask is this: Do your network and security teams have a shared view of how your environment actually works today, or are they solving their own problems in isolation?
If the answer is the latter, you probably have more exposure than you realize, and more integration debt than anyone has put a number to.
That’s the conversation we’re good at: not pitching a product, but helping leadership teams understand what their current stack looks like when you map it honestly, where the gaps are, and what a path forward looks like that doesn’t require starting over.
The cable doesn’t care about your SLA. It doesn’t know your application is business critical. It just carries the traffic, until it doesn’t. The question isn’t whether your routing will face a disruption. It’s whether you’ll see it coming.
Guest Author
Joe Sikora — Global Chief Revenue Officer
Joe Sikora is a senior executive responsible for global revenue growth at Globalgig, leading enterprise sales across connectivity and security.
With over 20 years in the telecommunications sector, he has held leadership roles at Globalgig, GTT, and other telecom providers, building and scaling national and global sales organizations focused on delivering connectivity solutions for large enterprises. He holds a degree in telecommunications from Ohio University and an MBA from Ashland University.