2025 IT Networking Trends - NETGEAR Blog

AI tools are rapidly advancing, but their success hinges on the underlying network infrastructure. Institutions embracing AI for administrative automation, predictive analytics, or interactive learning must ensure their networks can handle increased traffic without bottlenecks. Poorly optimized networks lead to delays and inefficiencies, undermining the potential of AI. The other element is a harsh financial reality: the costs of AI innovation are fully incremental. IT and financial departments will have to work together to find savings elsewhere to fund AI implementation. Prior investments in enterprise network technology are hard to justify – it may be time to look at high-performance network technology without huge license/maintenance costs. … ## Balancing Security and Performance Increased focus on cybersecurity often hampers network performance. There are two issues here, actually. The rapid deployment of Zero Trust (ZT) or Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) models has lead to systems delays and low performance, frustrating users. Much of the post-COVID budgets for networking and info-security have been used for modern security improvements, often at permanent and significant cost increases for large organizations. The result is that other parts of the IT infrastructure, like wired and wireless networks, have become bottlenecks, worsening over-all performance even more.