AI is the technology that dominates the headlines, but among CIOs, network security remains the top focus. In Extreme Networks’ CIO Insights Report: Priorities and Investment Plans in the Era of Platformization, just over one-third (34%) of CIOs surveyed said network security is their No. 1 priority, and over half (55%) placed it among their top three. In fact, even when it comes to AI, security is still a major concern – 40% said they worry about data security when deploying this technology.
To address these security concerns, CIOs are turning to platformization in cloud networking, with almost nine in 10 (88%) of CIOs saying they’d prefer a single integrated platform for networking, AI and security.
“Network security should be viewed as one cohesive unit,” said Nabil Bukhari, CTO at Extreme Networks. “You cannot achieve network connectivity without security, and vice versa. Our entire society is built on the premise that everybody and everything is connected. Now, the moment everything is connected, what’s the first thing that everybody fears about? How secure is it? When they are converged, IT leaders can deliver security and compliance across the platform experience, which helps to reduce overlaps, blind spots and vulnerabilities.”
As enterprises’ IT teams deploy AI and other complex technologies, understanding how these technologies interact with security and networking becomes even more critical, given that workloads will be distributed across on-premises, edge, cloud, private cloud, and hybrid environments. Tightly integrating AI, networking and security has become imperative to enable rapid IT innovation.
Platformization unifies applications, features, and capabilities so that workflows, common services and data are all integrated and easily managed. It’s much simpler to understand the security implications of deploying AI, for instance, through an integrated platform. And because everything is on a single platform, it’s also much easier to scale and add new devices without having to perform a major overhaul at the application layer. Integration at the data level simplifies control and compliance, and, because the platform simplifies maintenance and integration, platformization can significantly reduce operating costs.
What’s more, high-quality platformization embeds AI throughout every interaction, every scan, and every deployment, which, again, helps to unlock the real value of AI to simplify management and cohere networking, applications, data and security. AI is all about delivering an experience that helps cut through network complexity. It’s difficult to automate complexity away, but applying AI with simplicity in mind from the start makes it easier to leverage AI to create experiences that enable everyone to get value out of a platform.
For example, as AI learns more about the environment and its human operators, it can provide recommendations and enable easy training that helps make the platform even more effective and simple to operate. With the assistance of AI, the platform becomes intuitive to use, reducing the time and expense of training admins on the system.
“A platform approach, when constructed effectively, should make it easier to deploy, secure and train your team on AI because it is self-learning,” Bukhari said. “Using the platform teaches your team, and immediately enables it, without the need for ineffective training processes, all of which helps the enterprise get to value quickly.”
Get all the insights and access the Strategic Recommendations Checklist from Extreme Networks in the CIO Insights Report: Priorities and Investment Plans in the Era of Platformization.
