Far from being a commodity, the enterprise network has a vital role to play in keeping organizations agile, responsive, and safe. Growing volumes of data and increasingly latency-sensitive apps and services are placing fresh demands on the network, which must balance speed and flexibility against security and resilience. Here, we’ll look at the technologies and trends affecting organizational networks in 2025 and beyond.
5G: Faster Speeds and a Host of New Applications
With the potential for speeds more than 100 times faster than 4G, 5G has exciting implications for businesses across many different sectors. The rollout of 5G is ongoing, with 85% of the US population able to access mid-band 5G.
5G offers greater bandwidth and reliability and lower latency than previous generations of cellular networks, allowing it to transmit much larger data volumes with higher speeds. This makes it a compelling alternative to wired access for both primary and backup connectivity.
5G also promises a whole variety of new use cases, such as:
- Autonomous vehicles, which require high-speed connectivity to function
- Smart healthcare, allowing greater connectivity between functions within healthcare settings, and better remote patient care (such as remote measurements of blood pressure and blood sugar levels)
- Smart cities, where functions like traffic management, waste disposal, and energy efficiency are connected through 5G networks
- Smart manufacturing to boost the sector’s efficiency, agility, and resilience
SD-WAN: Changing With the Times
Software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) is an approach that virtualizes network architecture and allows it to be controlled centrally. This creates a network that’s significantly easier to manage, improves performance, and makes it simpler and quicker to make changes.
Although SD-WAN isn’t a new technology, it’s continuing to evolve in response to other technological developments. For example, it combines effectively with secure remote access strategies.
Secure access service edge (SASE) brings together the performance management of SD-WAN with a suite of security features, allowing remote users to work productively without compromising corporate safeguards.
In combination, SD-WAN and 5G also promise a network architecture that’s diverse, simple, agile, and high-performance.
IoT Demands Fast, Seamless Connectivity
The number of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices is expected to have risen to 18.8 billion by the end of 2024. IoT deployments are increasing across a wide variety of different verticals, including automotive, healthcare, and manufacturing.
Fast connectivity is essential, as many IoT devices need very low latency to send and receive data, integrate with analytics platforms, and receive instructions from controllers.
5G is fast becoming a popular choice for IoT connectivity, as it offers the speed, capacity, minimal latency, and reliability that these devices demand.
Putting Intelligence in the Network
As networks become more complex to manage and growing volumes of data leave them straining under the increased load, AI promises to improve performance and responsiveness and slash the time needed to maintain them. Unsurprisingly, then, 96% of IT decision-makers have already implemented AI in their network operations or plan to do so shortly.
AI’s capacity to analyze and learn from vast quantities of information allows it to harness valuable usage and performance data. It can use this to provide a granular view of the network, offer configuration recommendations, and even automatically reroute traffic and administer and troubleshoot the network to improve performance.
The Challenges of Networking the Multicloud
Multicloud strategies are on the rise: 87% of firms now use multiple cloud providers. This approach allows enterprises to choose the best vendor for each requirement, improves redundancy and resilience, and avoids vendor lock-in.
Networking these different clouds, however, is a significant challenge. According to Gartner, interoperability and connectivity are key issues for enterprises that have adopted a multicloud model.
Different architectures and approaches from different cloud vendors, the need to secure data across these various environments, and a lack of transparency across the entire network are all factors that make it difficult to create a secure, seamless infrastructure.
Cloud-to-cloud connectivity using virtual routing at the cloud edge is one approach that provides the performance that cloud services demand, but it avoids unnecessary backhaul and traffic passing needlessly over the WAN.
Network-as-a-Service: The Cloud Model Comes to Networking
Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) applies a cloud-like, on-demand model to networking. Essentially, it allows businesses to rent network services, instead of having to buy, implement, and manage their own network equipment.
This approach dramatically reduces the burden of network management for the IT team, and it can be much more cost-effective, as organizations only pay for the services they currently need instead of ordering contingency capacity. It also eradicates CAPEX on these network services. Capacity can easily and quickly be scaled up or down as the organization needs it, even if demand is unpredictable, making it a more flexible model than traditional network infrastructures.
Network Security: Balancing Risk Against Flexibility
As the network perimeter becomes less well defined, and more and more employees work remotely or from home, organizational infrastructures become more difficult to secure.
At the same time, AI-powered security attacks are becoming more frequent, more powerful, and more difficult to stop – although AI’s ability to analyze large amounts of data and provide security insights may play an important role in network safeguarding in the future.
Small wonder, then, that many enterprises are turning to cybersecurity insurance to help protect themselves against the risks and losses associated with cyberattacks. But what technologies are we seeing that can secure these complex and sprawling networks?
As we’ve discussed, SASE is an important approach for applying consistent security policies across the network. One element of SASE is Zero Trust Network Architecture (ZTNA), which offers granular access control.
ZTNA prevents unauthorized users outside the network from gaining access, and it also authenticates devices inside the network that are attempting to access resources. This means ZTNA strengthens internal network security as well as helping to protect the network perimeter.
The number of devices connected to enterprise networks continues to rise, and these endpoints are a common target for threats like malware attacks. That’s why endpoint security is another critical layer of protection, as it allows security teams to detect and prevent or remediate these breaches before they cause damage.
What’s Next for Networking?
As we’ve seen, AI is a major player in network trends, and it’s becoming more prevalent in network and security management.
As its usage becomes more widespread, however, networks will need to adapt to the greater volumes of “bursty” and latency-sensitive traffic that AI often entails. Some experts even predict that the network of the future will be entirely configured around the demands of AI.
Looking further ahead, experimental technologies like nanoscale networks and – most importantly – quantum networking have the potential to solve fundamental networking challenges and turn the market on its head.
Instead of conventional networking methods that are based on the transmission of electrons or photons, quantum networking moves data around using quantum phenomena. Although true quantum networking is still in the very early stages, it promises to create intrinsically secure communication links that can’t be intercepted without the sender and receiver becoming aware.
Keeping abreast of networking trends is critical for organizations seeking to stay ahead in a marketplace characterized by rapid change. Finding the right network partner can ease the burden of keeping up with the latest advances in technology, and helps make sure your network is fully supporting the strategic needs of your organization – now and into the future.