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2019 Prediction: Enterprises Will Use AI to Replace VPNs with Micro-Perimeters to Optimize Hybrid Cloud Application Performance

Don Boxley

Many enterprises are pursuing a hybrid IT strategy involving integrated on-premises systems and off-premises cloud/hosted resources. This pursuit will create application performance issues stemming from one key area: leveraging the public internet.

For enterprises the public Internet is both a boon and a danger. The public Internet's global reach offers an easy and cost-effective means for engaging large numbers of customers, regardless of location. However, using the public internet to connect users with business-critical workloads brings risks.

Businesses survive on speed. Customers don't like to wait, and each moment waiting has real revenue implications. Companies investing heavily in hybrid IT strategy around enterprise applications are making these investments to gain an edge, but these investments will only deliver a positive return if the applications are able to run at maximum performance allowed.

As an access path to the cloud, the performance of the public Internet can be limited by traffic and throughput impediments, which can impact the effectiveness of workloads right at peak load times. If enterprise applications struggle to deal with peak loads, this can result in the business suffering revenue loss, damage to their reputation and failing to meet the objectives of moving to a hybrid cloud strategy.

This performance issue can become even more severe as an organization seeks to improve network security by adding secure connectivity in order to reduce security exposure via the public internet by using traditional VPNs, which can cut throughput in half. But traditional VPN software solutions are obsolete for the new IT reality of hybrid and multi-cloud. They weren't designed for them. They're complex to configure, not performant, and they give users a "slice of the network," creating a lateral network attack surface.

A new class of purpose-built security software is emerging to eliminate these issues and disrupt the cloud VPN market. This new security software will enable organizations to build lightweight dynamic micro-perimeters to secure their application- and workload-centric connections between on-premises and cloud/hosted environments, with virtually no attack surface and without the performance issues of VPNs.

Because of the ease of use this new class of security software organizations will utilize at 1-2-3-100+ deployment strategy. That is, they'll deploy micro-perimeters for workload #1. Satisfied it meets the performance and security requirements, they'll deploy micro-perimeters for workload #2, and then deploy for workload #3. At that point, the organization will require micro-perimeters for every application, which could be 100s of workloads with thousands of users. This is the point organizations will turn to artificial intelligence (AI). This is where organizations will leverage their learnings in artificial intelligence to find products that can automate, manage and simplify the machine learning (ML) for each enterprise application's unique connectivity network to map out the optimal deployment of micro-perimeters. This deployment plan will enable organizations to aggressively implement micro-perimeters with the eventual goal of the AI engine deploying and updating micro-perimeters automatically.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

2019 Prediction: Enterprises Will Use AI to Replace VPNs with Micro-Perimeters to Optimize Hybrid Cloud Application Performance

Don Boxley

Many enterprises are pursuing a hybrid IT strategy involving integrated on-premises systems and off-premises cloud/hosted resources. This pursuit will create application performance issues stemming from one key area: leveraging the public internet.

For enterprises the public Internet is both a boon and a danger. The public Internet's global reach offers an easy and cost-effective means for engaging large numbers of customers, regardless of location. However, using the public internet to connect users with business-critical workloads brings risks.

Businesses survive on speed. Customers don't like to wait, and each moment waiting has real revenue implications. Companies investing heavily in hybrid IT strategy around enterprise applications are making these investments to gain an edge, but these investments will only deliver a positive return if the applications are able to run at maximum performance allowed.

As an access path to the cloud, the performance of the public Internet can be limited by traffic and throughput impediments, which can impact the effectiveness of workloads right at peak load times. If enterprise applications struggle to deal with peak loads, this can result in the business suffering revenue loss, damage to their reputation and failing to meet the objectives of moving to a hybrid cloud strategy.

This performance issue can become even more severe as an organization seeks to improve network security by adding secure connectivity in order to reduce security exposure via the public internet by using traditional VPNs, which can cut throughput in half. But traditional VPN software solutions are obsolete for the new IT reality of hybrid and multi-cloud. They weren't designed for them. They're complex to configure, not performant, and they give users a "slice of the network," creating a lateral network attack surface.

A new class of purpose-built security software is emerging to eliminate these issues and disrupt the cloud VPN market. This new security software will enable organizations to build lightweight dynamic micro-perimeters to secure their application- and workload-centric connections between on-premises and cloud/hosted environments, with virtually no attack surface and without the performance issues of VPNs.

Because of the ease of use this new class of security software organizations will utilize at 1-2-3-100+ deployment strategy. That is, they'll deploy micro-perimeters for workload #1. Satisfied it meets the performance and security requirements, they'll deploy micro-perimeters for workload #2, and then deploy for workload #3. At that point, the organization will require micro-perimeters for every application, which could be 100s of workloads with thousands of users. This is the point organizations will turn to artificial intelligence (AI). This is where organizations will leverage their learnings in artificial intelligence to find products that can automate, manage and simplify the machine learning (ML) for each enterprise application's unique connectivity network to map out the optimal deployment of micro-perimeters. This deployment plan will enable organizations to aggressively implement micro-perimeters with the eventual goal of the AI engine deploying and updating micro-perimeters automatically.

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...