2025 Enterprise Connectivity Year-in-Review What Changed & What CIOs Learned
By AireSpring – Delivering Next-Generation Connectivity, Security & Managed Services
As we close out 2025, one thing is clear: connectivity is no longer just infrastructure. It is now the operational backbone of digital business models, security strategies, hybrid work, and customer experience. This past year pushed CIOs across every vertical—healthcare, finance, retail, manufacturing, and beyond—to rethink how they design, purchase, and manage enterprise networks.
AireSpring has spent the year in conversation with CIOs, architects, and transformation teams across the mid-market and enterprise landscape. Combined with industry research from firms like Gartner, IDC, Dell’Oro Group, Flexera, and ISC2, several patterns have emerged. Here’s what’s changed and what CIOs learned over the past 12 months.
1. The Network Became a Security Architecture, Not Just a Transport Layer
Multiple sources have highlighted this shift. Gartner data, widely cited by vendors and media, projected that by 2025 at least 60% of enterprises will have explicit strategies and timelines for SASE adoption, up from around 10% in 2020.
Forrester – Convergence of Networking & Security
- Forrester’s 2024 Zero Trust Edge (ZTE) Landscape notes that enterprises increasingly expect networking and security to be procured together driven by cloud adoption and distributed workforces.
Uptime Institute – Outage Risk Linked to Network Architecture
- Uptime Institute reports that network-related outages continue to rise, with misconfigurations and distributed architectures as leading causes.
Key 2025 Takeaway
Security and connectivity procurement merged. More CIOs sought integrated SASE and SD-WAN solutions from providers capable of unifying routing, segmentation, and policy enforcement through a unified fabric.
How CIOs Took Action
Organizations leaned heavily on managed offerings that incorporate SD-WAN, SASE, and next-gen firewalls into a single service experience, effectively reducing complexity and filling internal talent gaps.
2. AI-Driven Network Operations (AIOps) Became Mainstream
The complexity of modern enterprise networks driven by hybrid work, distributed cloud, and edge deployments made manual network operations untenable. In 2025, many organizations turned to AI-informed and automated networking tools. Accordingly, AI for IT Operations (AIOps) is increasingly viewed as essential for monitoring performance, anticipating issues, optimizing traffic flows, and automating configuration.
Analyst and industry commentary supports this trend. For example, Gartner includes AI-driven operations and observability in its Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2024 and 2025, pointing specifically to AIOps, continuous threat exposure management, and AI governance. Independent AIOps commentary highlights the accelerating integration of AI into IT operations to cope with scale and complexity.
Key 2025 Takeaway
CIOs realized that AI is not about replacing NOC teams. It’s about elevating them by reducing operational noise, lowering mean-time-to-repair (MTTR), and improving reliability across a sprawling multi-site, multi-cloud estate.
How CIOs Took Action
With multi-carrier aggregation and visibility into diverse access types, more CIOs sought providers who could integrate AI-driven analytics and unified monitoring into a simplified, fully managed service. With AIreCONTROL, AireSpring’s IT service management (ITSM) platform, enterprises get 360-degree network monitoring along AIOps data from the national power grid, national weather alerts, carrier network outage feeds, endpoint telemetry data across tens of thousands of devices, and syslog and security event logs.
3. Multi-Cloud Connectivity Stopped Being Optional and Became the Default
Cloud deployments continued to evolve in 2025: hybrid-cloud architectures, distributed workloads, and edge computing deployments became more common. This shift made strong, reliable connectivity across multiple clouds a necessity. According to a 2025 report by Dell’Oro Group, the distributed cloud networking market will accelerate to $17 billion by 2028, driven by AI and hybrid cloud. At the same time, enterprises increasingly viewed their network backbone as strategic rather than a “plumbing” afterthought.
Key 2025 Takeaway:
Multi-cloud is now the default. CIOs embraced private backbone connectivity, secure gateways, and cloud-on-ramp services to ensure reliable performance for mission-critical SaaS, AI models, and distributed applications.
How CIOs Took Action
Enterprises prioritized providers with carrier-diverse global reach, flexible Layer 2/3 options, and direct cloud interconnect capabilities — not just raw bandwidth.
4. The Great WAN Rationalization: “Do More with Less” Became an Organizational Imperative
With network demand rising from cloud workloads, hybrid work, remote branches, and distributed teams, many CIOs found themselves needing more performance at the same (or lower) cost. Driven by this pressure, organizations migrated away from legacy MPLS, consolidated vendors, and sought managed SD-WAN / WAN-as-a-Service (WaaS) models. Industry data shows managed SD-WAN adoption acceleration, with growth fueled by cloud adoption, remote work, and demand for security-integrated connectivity. Industry forecasts back this up. For example, Dell’Oro Group highlights the growth of SD-WAN and SASE as an important indicator of the shift.
Key 2025 Takeaway:
Cost optimization and modernization converged. The most successful IT organizations leveraged:
- Carrier diversity without administrative overload
- Managed SD-WAN to replace legacy MPLS
- Aggregation services to simplify purchase orders (POs), support, and vendor management
How CIOs Took Action
CIOs increasingly offloaded the complexity of multi-site connectivity to a single provider able to act as an aggregator, orchestrator, and lifecycle partner, not just a bandwidth vendor.
5. Unified Communications, Voice, and Customer-Experience Platforms Evolved Again
As enterprise voice, unified communications as-a-service (UCaaS), and contact center as-a-service (CCaaS) platforms matured, their success remained tightly coupled to the reliability and performance of the underlying network. For CIOs, this meant that connectivity decisions once again influenced not just data transmission, but employee experience, customer satisfaction, and brand reputation.
Poorly optimized or unreliable network paths meant dropped calls, slow voice/video sessions, and degraded collaboration, which increasingly pushed enterprises to adopt integrated connectivity and voice services with built-in quality of service (QoS), service level agreement (SLA) support, and global reach.
Key 2025 Takeaway:
Many CIOs realized connectivity still determines voice and customer experience quality. Even the best UCaaS/CCaaS platforms underperform if network backbone is not enterprise-grade.
How CIOs Took Action
End-to-end voice quality assurance became a major driver in selecting integrated providers delivering connectivity plus voice and communication services.
6. Talent Shortages and Skills Gaps Increased Demand for Managed Services
Finding and retaining staff skilled in network engineering, hybrid cloud, security, and SD-WAN/SASE architectures remained a challenge. As networks grew more complex, many CIOs opted to partner with managed service providers (MSPs) or connectivity providers who deliver “network + security + operations” as a service.
The shift toward managed SD-WAN with integrated security reflects a broader move to simplify operations, reduce risk, boost agility, and mitigate staffing issues.
ISC2’s 2024 Cybersecurity Workforce Study reports an estimated global cybersecurity workforce gap of 4.8 million professionals. In recent research by Deloitte, the tech-talent shortage highlights how pervasive skills gaps are and why organizations must change how they plan, attract, and develop tech talent.
Key 2025 Takeaway:
The shift wasn’t about outsourcing responsibility — it was about enabling internal IT teams to focus on strategic, business-impacting projects rather than operational firefighting.
How CIOs Took Action
Turnkey managed services backed by robust SLAs, white-glove support, and engineering PODs became essential for mid-market and enterprise clients looking to scale reliably and securely without straining internal resources.
What Did CIOs Ultimately Learn in 2025?
Across industries, the lessons were consistent:
- Connectivity is now a strategic business asset, not just a utility
- Networking, security, and voice must be integrated, not siloed
- AI-assisted operations are no longer experimental, they’re expected
- Vendor consolidation simplifies everything from billing to security posture
- Hybrid work, multi-cloud, and edge deployments demand resilient, flexible connectivity
In short: CIOs learned that the right connectivity strategy accelerates business outcomes, innovation, and resilience.
Looking Ahead to 2026
The pace of change isn’t slowing. The enterprises that will lead in 2026 are those focusing on:
- Cybersecurity built into every connection (Zero-Trust and cloud-native SASE)
- Flexible access options for every location (cloud-on-ramp, multi-cloud, and global reach)
- Automated, intelligent network operations (AIOps, unified monitoring, and analytics)
- Global voice and collaboration capabilities maintained with true end-to-end SLAs
- Partners who simplify complexity, not add to it
With global connectivity options in over 190 countries, paired with fully managed solutions such as SD-WAN and SASE, industry-leading customer service through a dedicated AIrePOD team of Tier 3 engineers, and the AIreCONTROL ITSM platform, AireSpring is ready to help CIOs in mid-market and enterprise organizations accelerate their digital transformation strategies.
