The top 5 trends in enterprise networking and why they matter: A Gartner® trend insight report

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Enterprise network demands are growing, and Gartner estimates that this year the global annual network spending will increase over six percent to $79.04 billion. Enterprise networking innovations can help organizations improve operations – but with budget limitations, the challenge for infrastructure and operations leaders is sifting through the hype to determine which deserve investment.

Improve enterprise network infrastructure

To aid these decisions, Gartner has identified the top five trends with the potential to improve enterprise network infrastructure and operations in the next two years. The report “The top 5 trends in enterprise networking and why they matter” takes a closer look at these trends: secure access service edge (SASE), multi-cloud networking, 5G, NetDevOps, and Network as a Service (NaaS).

Secure access service edge (SASE)

When both your end-users and applications are everywhere, applying consistent security can present challenges. Secure access service edge or SASE can offer enterprises with a unified platform to manage security across their users, applications, as well as locations. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 50 percent of SD-WAN purchases will be part of a single vendor SASE offering, up from less than 10 percent in 2021.

Multi-cloud networking

Enterprise public cloud deployments often span multiple platforms, and this creates some challenges. Multi-cloud networking addresses this problem, providing management and operational scale for large public cloud deployments.

5G

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 10 percent of enterprises will use 5G for primary or backup connectivity in their WAN, up from 1 percent today. Upgrades to 5G standard support increased data speeds and the ability to customize connections for specific users and applications, replacing current 3G/4G services which are often not robust or reliable enough for enterprise networking requirements.

NetDevOps

Common network operations practices are not aligned with agile infrastructure as code (IaC) and DevOps initiatives. NetDevOps innovations can offer you better network visibility and the ability to quickly spot and fix service issues. According to Gartner, by 2025, 25 percent of enterprises will automate more than half of their network activities, an increase from less than 8 percent of enterprises in early 2022.

Network as a Service (NaaS)

Traditionally, network products and services been offered in fixed packages, requiring substantial investments which might not evolve according to the requirements of your business. Network as a Service (NaaS) offerings allow organizations more flexible ways of purchasing network hardware and software as well as having the ability to dynamically change network connections to fit their needs. Last year the adoption of NaaS was less than 1 percent but Gartner sees this jumping to 15 percent of all enterprises by end of 2024.

While SASE and multi-cloud networking are already seeing significant uptake among enterprise customers, 5G, NetDevOps and NaaS are emerging trends with strong predicted growth over the next couple of year years.

Download the report to find out more about these trends and what actions to take to benefit from them.