What’s Next is a biweekly conversation between SDxCentral CEO Matt Palmer and a senior-level executive from the technology industry. In each video, Matt has an informal but in-depth video chat with a fellow thought leader to uncover what the future holds for the enterprise IT and telecom markets — the hook is each guest is a long-term acquaintance of Matt’s, so expect a lively conversation.

This time out, Palmer spoke with Kelly Ahuja president and CEO of Versa Networks. Ahuja is a seasoned industry veteran with more than 20 years of experience in networking and telecommunications, including 18 years at Cisco. He currently serves on the board of directors for two startups in Silicon Valley.

Editor’s note: The following is a summary of what Palmer and Ahuja discussed in their conversation, edited for length. To hear the full conversation, be sure to watch the video.

Matt Palmer: I wanted to get your perspective on what's coming next down the pike in terms of what should enterprise leaders be thinking about as they build out their infrastructure. So I know that's great, big and amorphous, and we'll get to some buzzwords later. But why don't we just start with that? What are you seeing out there?

Kelly Ahuja: First, let's talk about the current state of affairs. And what's driving the change, because change is coming. At all of us from all directions for every enterprise ... but here's kind of what I see happening on one side. The current environment has evolved into the current state of affairs. What do I mean by that? Well, if you look at every enterprise organization, typically they have a place in the network where they've identified a WAN team that takes care of branch or remote offices and corporate offices. Another one that's focused on remote access. Another one that's focused on campus. And the last one that's focused on other things — could be cloud, could be data center or whatever else.

Now, each one of these teams traditionally has made their own decisions around what they want to do for network and security. So what you've ended up with is a buffet of products. In an organization across these different areas of the network that now the enterprise has to integrate themselves.

And as things have shifted more to cloud, IoT, remote and hybrid work have gone up in dramatic volume. So all of these things along with the attack, the bad guys coming in, sophistication and the volume of attacks driving things. You need to be able to detect faster. You need to be able to act on things faster. All that is driving a lot of pain for the current CSOs and CIOs, and they're looking to figure out how they can keep up with all of this while staying within budget. Because budgets aren't unlimited. Every CEO, including me, says 'We're gonna grow the top line.' But we're not necessarily gonna grow the expenses. So how do you do more with less or the same? That's kind of what the name of the game is.

So a lot of discussions about platformization and looking at security in different ways. But still, I think there's a gap in the industry, which is network and security have not been looked at as one thing. And that's the thing that puzzles me. Because if you take a look at the sophistication of attacks, and where they're coming from, where you want to prevent those and detect those and remediate those in real-time is really at the edge. And the edge is not your security edge. The edge is your network edge. So you've got to do this inside the network at every edge, whether it's outside the organization, in a cloud inside the perimeter of the organization or at the LAN. It's everywhere, and you've got to do it consistently, and that's the piece that hasn't been there until we came up.

Where I believe the industry is headed is really around a few key pivots. One is anything that's going to be deployed is going to be an AI-based platform-based approach for the infrastructure network or security. It's going to be an AI-powered platform that handles it. What that platform needs to do is to secure access to for everything and every everyone. Not just devices or sites. It's gonna be about users.

The next thing is, it's gotta allow for something to securely connect from anywhere to anywhere, because the applications and workloads could be at the edge could be in the cloud could be in the data center. But you've got to allow a connectivity across all those. But most important thing is, you've got to have real-time threat protection, and protection is really about detection and remediation at every edge. Not somewhere in the data center, not only in the cloud but at every edge in the enterprise, a LAN edge, a cloud edge or whatever edge you might add.

And lastly, it's gotta be available the way that the enterprises want to consume it. To your point about, 'I don't have the resources I want, as a managed service' or 'I've got the resources and the talent. I can operate it myself and build it myself.'

You've got to have flexibility in terms of how you consume it.

Watch the full video for the rest of the conversation between these old friends and colleagues, who also happen to be tech visionaries.