As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor.
AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations.
EMA's new report, Readying Enterprise Networks for Artificial Intelligence, serves as a strategic guide for IT decision-makers who have started their AI journey. Some of the key findings from the report include:
- The top business challenges to networking for AI are security risk (39%), budget issues (34%), and difficulties with keeping up the pace of AI innovation (33%).
- 42% of companies have established AI centers of excellence to lead strategy across technical teams and business units.
- Organizations that can automatically apply quality of service or routing policies specific to AI-related traffic report more success with preparing their networks for AI.
Networks will make or break enterprise investments in AI technology. IT organizations are well-aware of this fact. However, preparing networks for AI will be expensive and complex. This research shows that AI workloads will be distributed across public clouds, data centers, and the enterprise edge. This kind of architecture requires improvements to both data center and wide-area networks.