The role of IT is fundamentally changing from a cost-efficient enablement technology to a more strategic element of the enterprise. For companies born before the digital era, IT is a key player on their path to digital transformation; for more recent businesses designed with technology at their core, IT represents a foundational pillar on top of which everything else is built.

With this shifting role, IT’s decades-long emphasis on TCO is being eclipsed by a new-found focus on security and automation. Whether it’s the continuous risks posed by a dynamic threat landscape, the threat of digital disruption, or an inability to keep pace with the latest trends, virtually every enterprise needs to be more agile. And, with the continued evolution of compute, storage, and applications, networks have been exposed as a bottleneck to change.

Put simply, enterprise IT is more critical than ever. The network itself represents both a risk and an opportunity as IT leaders plot out their evolutionary paths.