Over the last decade, Europe’s enterprises have adopted transformative technologies to meet changing business and regulatory demands. First came the shift to the cloud, with flexible computing power, massive data crunching and cutting-edge applications that made businesses nimbler and more productive. Now, AI is driving a new phase of innovation.

Yet one core part of the tech stack has been neglected: the network. The pipes, cables and wireless routers connecting every device and user, the humble network was often viewed as the last bastion of change. While applications, cloud platforms and collaboration tools evolved rapidly – accelerated by soaring bandwidth, hybrid work and AI workloads – the network often stood still, while everything else advanced.

That’s now changed: the network is center stage once again. With increased focus on business resiliency, the network has become both critical and vulnerable.

Network effect

The rapid shift to hybrid working during Covid renewed focus on network innovation. Cloud migration had already transformed application security, but the pandemic accelerated convergence between networking and security to enable secure remote access at scale. This gave rise to Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architectures, combining SD-WAN and

cloud-based security to protect users and data everywhere, while maintaining performance across a distributed digital fabric.

“Virtually overnight, businesses needed to apply the same security at home as in the office,” reflects Amit Mehrotra, Vice President and Head of the UK & Ireland region at Tata Communications. “Accessing important company data via home broadband was a huge issue. It thrust the network back to the heart of the corporate IT agenda.”

Since then, the need to protect enterprise networks has only grown. Hybrid working and anytime, anyplace access is now standard, while threat actors have grown more sophisticated, including using AI-based attacks.

But locking systems down into a digital Fort Knox isn’t the answer. Organizations and employees need flexible, adaptable networks. They increasingly rely on SaaS platforms – from productivity suites and CRM systems to AI generative models and machine learning services in the cloud. And there are more applications living at the edge of the network, running on increasingly powerful devices.

It’s this dichotomy – ensuring networks are simultaneously flexible AND secure – that is so challenging for IT leaders.

Industry implications

Enterprises across sectors are balancing stronger security with flexibility. In industries such as finance, retail and hospitality, networks must identify users, devices and applications in milliseconds without slowing workflows. Here, zero-trust methodologies enable security at speed.

In manufacturing or energy, the challenge is evolving. Once dominated by legacy operational technology (OT), these environments are now replaced by intelligent devices, automation systems and AI tools turning operational data into real-time insights.

OT environments are increasingly being connected into enterprise IT networks, and this convergence creates opportunities for productivity and real-time insights. But it also adds complexity. Here, extending SASE principles to the edge is becoming critical, enabling organizations to apply consistent network and security policies across both IT and OT domains, without compromising agility or performance.

Similarly, Alexandru Duca, Head of Automation and Operation Technology at shipping and logistics company Maersk, observes: “In logistics, the old divide between IT systems in the cloud and OT systems that run warehouses and fleets has disappeared. With Industry 4.0, these worlds are now tightly connected, bringing efficiency and real-time insights, but also new risks. For logistics technology leaders, the message is clear: security is not a barrier to progress; it is the enabler of structured IT/OT integration and resilient growth. The future of logistics will belong to companies that design secure, modular and reliable operation ecosystems.”

Simplifying security complexity

For some IT leaders, the temptation is to engage security vendors at different levels of the technology stack. This enhances safeguards but also creates complexity as, for instance, a network security vendor and application security vendor can overlap or duplicate.

“Our approach is creating balance between usability and security measures,” observes Amit Kapoor, Vice President and Head of Europe at Tata Communications. “For example, if a customer is running SD-WAN from one vendor and cloud security from another, we help them orchestrate those tools, so they work seamlessly together and are completely opaque to the end users yet secure.

“Enterprises having multiple tools and technologies is a reality of today”, continues Kapoor. I “Instead of adding yet another point solution, we enable companies to standardize their policies across multiple vendors and manage them through a single framework and platform-based approach.”

By embedding security by design into the network – with zero-trust principles, identity-driven access controls and policy automation built into its digital fabric – Tata Communications provides an overlay that unifies disparate security tools across the IT environment. This approach not only reduces duplication and complexity, but ensures every connection, from the cloud to the edge, is protected in real-time.

For example, DNV partnered with Tata Communications to improve agility and reduce costs. With hybrid IZO Internet WAN and Managed Security Services (MSS), the company achieved lower risk, greater productivity, faster delivery and high network availability.

Ravi Rao, Cloud Operations Manager, EMEA Infrastructure, Ricoh Europe explains how the company has also been on a transformation journey. “Across EMEA, we’ve introduced SD-WAN with zero trust, network segmentation and integrated edge security. It has modernized our WAN and embedded security into the core fabric of our network.”

Similarly, a multinational medical equipment manufacturing company modernized its outdated IT infrastructure by adopting Tata Communications’ hybrid IZO SD-WAN, managed security and SIP solutions. This shift to cloud-based services improved visibility, enhanced application performance and security posture and balanced costs.

As the network becomes a new frontier of innovation in the era of AI and edge computing, finding a partner with the expertise to integrate and orchestrate security at the network layer should be every IT leader’s priority.

To learn more, visit Tata Communications.