With a new year comes fresh challenges and opportunities for IT teams. The cost of cybercrime will continue to rise, AI is driving explosive network traffic growth, and leading enterprises are continuing to digitally transform – and need the tools that can evolve with them.
According to Brian Daniels, Chief Sales Officer, at Zayo these trends are shaping how enterprises are investing in networking technologies and what they’re investing in:
- Increasingly complex cyber threats: Cybercrime is on the rise, with threats becoming more difficult to combat. During a Zayo webinar, cybersecurity experts raised concerns about the growing sophistication and frequency of attacks, urging organizations to adopt proactive measures that secure every layer of their networks.
- Bandwidth-intensive applications like AI: As businesses integrate AI into their operations and expand hybrid work models, the need for scalable networks has never been greater, according to insights from Zayo’s Solutions Architecture Team.
- The moving target of digital transformation: It’s becoming clear that digital transformation isn’t a destination – it’s a perhaps never-ending journey. Modern businesses require flexible networks to accommodate their needs now and in the future. This is pushing businesses to prioritize cloud-native solutions that increase agility, according to McKinsey Digital.
Let’s dive a little deeper into where customers are investing thanks to these key trends.
Cybersecurity: Weaving a Smarter Safety Net
With remote work, IoT devices, and cloud applications demanding seamless and secure connectivity, traditional cybersecurity approaches no longer cut it. These trends are creating new vulnerabilities and attack surfaces, creating an increasingly complex environment for businesses to secure.
In addition, DDoS attacks continue to become more sophisticated and frequent. According to Zayo’s latest data, DDoS attacks surged by 106% from H2 2023 to H1 2024. Factors like AI-driven cybercrime, geopolitical tensions, and hacktivism are only increasing the frequency and intensity of these incidents.
Zayo customers rely on a variety of tools to help identify vulnerabilities, enforce SLAs, and optimize operations, such as:
- SSE (Security Service Edge) solutions to integrate network security across cloud and on-premises environments and Managed SASE (Secure Access Security Edge) to reduce complexity by combining network performance and security into a unified framework. While companies used to focus on taking a piecemeal approach to edge, more are seeing the mandate to address edge networking and security at once. Daniels shares, “It used to be ‘I only have the budget to do SD-WAN now, and then we’ll add security later.’ Now, a lot of CIOs, CTOs, and CEOs are coming together and saying, we can’t delay security, we need to do it all at once.”
- Network observability tools like Zayo’s zInsights portal to gain observability and control of network health and performance. Built on AI and machine learning with a data lake completely secure within the Zayo ecosystem. Daniels says about our unique, market-leading zInsights tool, “We have a lot of insights into not only how the network is performing but how applications that rely on those networks are performing, as well, because we correlate all that data with AI and machine learning. We were doing that before AI and ML was cool.”
- Network-based DDoS Protection that scrubs malicious traffic at the core and protects traffic across network vendors. To combat increasingly complex cybercrime like DDoS attacks, businesses are rethinking their cybersecurity strategies. “We’re seeing a growing trend where businesses are no longer treating security as an afterthought—they’re approaching it holistically,” says Daniels, highlighting that today, companies are accelerating investments in smarter defense strategies.
These solutions enable businesses to take a more proactive approach to defend against threats. “It’s not just about stopping attacks—it’s about creating a secure foundation that empowers businesses to adapt and thrive,” Daniels explains.
Scalability: The Race to Keep Up
The rapid adoption of AI workloads, the automation of distribution centers, and the shift to hybrid work models are just some of the factors that have created unprecedented demand for bandwidth.
The scale of bandwidth and the technical requirements have gotten infinitely more complex.
“The scale of bandwidth and the technical requirements have gotten infinitely more complex,” says Daniels. He explains that these challenges are driving businesses to adopt modern solutions to help them scale in a world where downtime isn’t an option.
“We’ve seen customers eclipse their network capacity, driving demand for dedicated infrastructure that offers more control and flexibility,” says Daniels. Innovations in Wavelength capacity that enable faster turn-up like Zayo’s Waves On Demand, he says, enable businesses to expand bandwidth quickly—sometimes in as little as a week to meet the demands of today and tomorrow.
For some customers, a standard wavelengths offering doesn’t cut it. For those customers, Zayo stands up private dedicated networks. This gives them dedicated fiber and dedicated equipment for even more scalable and secure bandwidth. As bandwidth needs boom, we anticipate the demand for this solution to follow suit.
Network infrastructure providers aren’t the only ones facing the crunch of bandwidth demand – data centers are seeing striking demand for their services. In fact, McKinsey estimates AI will contribute to global demand for data center capacity more than tripling by 2030. In response, Zayo is continuously building new connections between data centers and new metro markets.
“We’re investing in a lot of unique offerings that will mean highly scalable, up to 100G SLA connections between edge locations and between data centers on a layer two and layer three platform that’s highly differentiated in the market,” Daniels explains.
Flexibility: Building Networks That Bend Without Breaking
Ongoing digital transformation requires agile infrastructure and networking technologies equipped to evolve with changing needs. With more cloud-based applications deployed to support remote and hybrid workforces and automation, innovative companies need not only fiber infrastructure that can scale flexibly, but equally agile solutions that layer on top of foundational networks.
SD-WAN solutions, for example, enable innovative organizations to achieve greater flexibility and agility by optimizing network performance, simplifying management, and allowing seamless connectivity across multiple locations. In an era when the headquarters and a few branch offices aren’t the only places employees work, a virtualized WAN solution is critical to network success.
What’s more, IT ecosystems are far more complex than they were a decade or two ago. Managed services options provide companies with even more flexibility. That’s why at Zayo we’re finding more organizations are choosing to bring in network engineering experts to supplement their teams and improve their networks’ efficiency and reliability with additional management.
Daniels says about Zayo’s managed services options, “We provide a more scalable bandwidth model for folks that would like to have a fiber optic backbone that they own and manage themselves but don’t have the operational capability to do so. For those customers, we take on that operational burden in the form of a managed network model.”
When enterprises engage with Zayo for Managed Edge services, for example, Zayo assists in designing, deploying, monitoring, and managing network solutions from the edge to anywhere. Acknowledging that network solutions aren’t one-size-fits-all, we offer a spectrum of edge network management options and a wide range of SASE, SSE, and SD-WAN vendors to provide the right solutions for our customers’ unique needs.
Zayo’s Roadmap for 2025
Looking to the year ahead, Daniels highlights a few key areas that Zayo will focus in response to the latest trends:
- Meeting AI-based capacity demands: “The tailwinds within the cloud and AI space are going to be really meaningful for Zayo. Providing scalable bandwidth between key locations has always been our players.”
- Enabling capacity that’s fast to turn-up: Zayo aims to continue shattering industry standards by enabling faster turn-up of our 400G Wavelength capacity in 2025.
- Meeting customer needs with a holistic, modern edge-core-cloud portfolio: We’ll continue to anticipate what’s next for our customers with a modern portfolio of networking services that help our customers innovate and remain connected at every layer.
This perspective underscores how Zayo’s approach isn’t just about building networks—it’s about empowering businesses to harness the possibilities of tomorrow, unlocking breakthroughs in technology and shaping a future where seamless connectivity drives innovation.
Ready for what’s next?
The demands on IT networks are growing, but so are the solutions. From smarter security strategies to scalable and flexible infrastructure, the trends shaping 2025 are all about empowering businesses to thrive in a fast-moving, always-connected world.