The 2025 Gartner Strategic Roadmap for Enterprise Networking outlines how enterprise networks must adapt to major shifts such as AI adoption, hybrid work, cloud-first strategies, and sustainability requirements. These changes are straining traditional network architectures and exposing gaps in automation, security integration, and operational agility.
This blog summarizes the key takeaways from the report to help IT and network leaders understand the challenges ahead and where to focus as they modernize their infrastructure. It’s meant to help IT and network teams cut through the noise, pinpoint where their current approach may fall short, and prioritize the areas that will have the biggest impact on performance, security, and scalability.
The rapid rise in AI-powered workloads—particularly those involving training and inference—is reshaping the architecture of infrastructure and compute. To meet this demand, data center footprints will be forced to scale rapidly, expanding capacity across on-premises, colocation, and hyperscale cloud environments.
At Versa, we’ve observed the impact of these trends firsthand. Training models, which require significant compute power, continue to run in centralized data centers. Concurrently, inference is gradually moving to the edge to enable real-time decisions and reduce latency.
This shift doesn’t just change where AI runs—it changes the architecture of how AI is handled. Supporting distributed AI workloads now requires intelligent fabrics, edge-ready connectivity, and seamless mobility between core and edge environments.
The report notes a clear trend: enterprises are increasingly seeking integrated architecture across the domains of WAN and security. To meet this need, the report predicts that self-managed or managed Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions will become the preferred enterprise approach. These unified platforms offer consistent policy enforcement, simplified operations, and secure, scalable access across cloud, edge, and remote environments—making them essential for supporting the modern enterprise network.
The report predicts that software-defined approaches will become foundational across both WAN and LAN, driven by the need for agility and automation essential to support AI-intensive workloads. Unlike traditional hardware-centric networks, software-defined networking eliminates manual configuration, accelerates provisioning, and simplifies troubleshooting, traffic engineering, and incident resolution.
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) will become the standard protocol for enabling unified, secure connectivity across both remote and corporate environments, replacing dual solutions of VPNs for remote access and legacy NAC for on-site access. This will lead to consistent policy enforcement and user experience across environments.
Enterprise networks are being reshaped by forces that won’t slow down—AI, hybrid work, and cloud-first initiatives are redefining where and how IT operates. The 2025 Gartner Strategic Roadmap is clear: existing architectures are falling short on flexibility, security, and scale.
Now is the time to reassess. As pressure mounts, the organizations that take deliberate steps to modernize their infrastructure will be better positioned to handle the complexity ahead—and to turn it into a competitive advantage.
Here’s where to focus:
Start by identifying the gaps in your current infrastructure—and build a modernization plan that aligns with where your network needs to go.
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