How today’s network decisions shape tomorrow’s enterprise
Jean-Philippe Avelange
Chief Information Officer
Every network decision you make today either unlocks (or limits) your enterprise’s future. Do you double down on legacy systems because they “still work”? Or build for what your business will need next year, or the next five years? How do you achieve a future-ready network?
Every enterprise claims to want to be future-ready. But the reality is that many are trying to run tomorrow’s digital operations on yesterday’s network. As CIOs, we’re expected to accelerate transformation while mitigating risk, reducing cost, and improving resilience. That doesn’t happen on a brittle, bandwidth-constrained backbone. The future-ready network requires infrastructure that’s adaptive by design and secure by default.
Let’s be clear: modern enterprise strategy depends on network flexibility and resilience. And that must be engineered carefully, not improvised.
Legacy infrastructure is costing you more than you think
CIOs often inherit complex, outdated, and costly networks that weren't built for today's demands. These legacy systems slow down agile DevOps workflows, hinder global deployments, and compromise business continuity due to lack of flexibility and diversity in infrastructure.
The data from the third annual IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Expereo, Enterprise Horizons 2025, Technology Leaders Priorities: Achieving Digital Agility, reinforces this:
- 28% of global enterprise technology leaders say downtime or poor performance cost them up to 1% of revenue (which is a minimum of $5M for mid-sized organizations).
- 23% say losses exceed that 1% threshold .
- Nearly half acknowledge that their networks can handle today's needs but will soon be obsolete.
Outdated network infrastructure isn't just expensive. It poses a growing risk to resilience, innovation, and productivity. That's why modernizing for flexibility and continuity is now among the highest CIO priorities globally.
Network transformation focused on flexibility and resilience are, understandably, at the top of the CIO priority list this year for global tech leaders.
A new focus on the network
According to the IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Expereo, Enterprise Horizons 2025, Technology Leaders Priorities: Achieving Digital Agility[JA1] , 43% of CIOs cite networking and connectivity as their top investment area, outpacing even cybersecurity (38%) and AI (37%). Why? Because these technologies rely entirely on a capable, secure, and scalable network backbone.
And it’s not just performance that’s on the line.
How does an outdated network infrastructure lead to system failures?
21% of businesses report security incidents tied to AI deployments. These vulnerabilities often stem from the inability of legacy networks to support policy-based access, traffic segmentation, or encrypted edge enforcement.
Enterprises need to roll out widescale security policies and keep updating them as over the next few years, AI-enabled tools will almost certainly enhance threat actors’ capability to exploit known vulnerabilities.
Network resilience design explained
True network resilience and security design is proactive, not reactive. It combines intelligent routing, real-time visibility, performance optimization, technology diversity, and integrated security policies to ensure consistent service delivery across unpredictable conditions. Everywhere your business operates.
In 2025, a future-ready network should have a combination of:
- SASE frameworks that embed policy-driven security into the network layer, enabling Zero Trust and reducing attack surface and supporting remote and distributed workforces.
- Cloud-native, software-defined networking (SD-WAN) that dynamically optimizes performance based on real-time telemetry.
- Enhanced Internet providing improved Global Internet performance to enable consistent application performance by routing traffic across the best-performing network path to the required destination.
- Intelligent path selection and failover across diverse internet connectivity solutions. This could mean Fixed Wireless Access (4G/5G/LTE) or Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite connectivity layered in where appropriate to provide automatic failover if anything happens to a fixed line.
- Integrated network visibility solutions, like expereoOne, that allow you to see the health of your network down to site level in real-time.
By integrating these solutions into your network strategy, you can transform network resilience into a strategic differentiator, ensuring your business remains online regardless of the circumstances.
The future-ready network starts at the edge
A future-ready network must simultaneously provide:
- Performance that adapts to users.
- Security that scales globally.
- Infrastructure agility across platforms.
A globally-distributed enterprise needs a connectivity strategy that’s agile, intelligent, and configured to support cloud workloads securely. With the rise of remote work, multi-cloud deployments, and API-first ecosystems, perimeter-based networking isn’t flexible enough for the modern workplace. This is precisely why Internet-based architectures are displacing legacy MPLS.
Modern networks start with a shift in thinking
I remember working with a global third-party supply chain and logistics provider who needed a flexible, agile network to support increasingly complex global digital and physical supply chains. They wanted to leverage more cloud-based solutions and needed the reliable, performance-enhancing bandwidth to achieve this.
Their legacy MPLS could not deliver the flexibility required, so we suggested moving to SD-WAN to provide the performance, agility, and scalability they needed. Even today, most thinking around the WAN remains relatively conservative. There’s often hesitation around moving away from MPLS and fully embracing the cloud. But there is life after MPLS, and with the right partners and an innovation mindset, you can power a high-performing, cloud-first network, built on the Internet.
Designing a future-ready network isn’t just about picking the right technologies; it’s about rethinking the way you approach connectivity. It’s a shift in mindset as much as a shift in architecture. That’s where Managed Service Providers (MSP) have become popular. 45% of enterprise technology leaders stated they would be increasing their use of MSPs to support with networking in the next 12 months in the IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Expereo, Enterprise Horizons 2025, Technology Leaders Priorities: Achieving Digital Agility.
MSPs, such as Expereo, bring the expertise, scale, and end-to-end visibility that most internal IT teams lack the bandwidth and skills to maintain. From selecting the right underlay and overlay mix to orchestrating SD-WAN, SASE, Enhanced Internet, and diverse access technologies like LEO or FWA, a good MSP can connect your sites without the complexity of a Do-It-Yourself approach.
And when they offer platforms like expereoOne, you gain a unified view of performance, usage, and spend, turning complexity into control.
Final thought: Invest in your network before the crisis
Business transformation doesn’t pause for infrastructure to catch up. Neither do cyberattacks or AI-driven threats. The network is no longer background IT, it’s become the platform upon which your digital enterprise operates.
If your infrastructure isn’t intelligent, secure, and scalable, neither is your business.
It’s time to stop patching the past and start building the future.
Get in touch today to discuss your networking needs.