Gartner defines the enterprise wired and wireless LAN market as the infrastructure that enables secure connectivity across enterprise locations. This encompasses the hardware, software, and management capabilities required to deliver physical and logical network connectivity, enforce zero-trust security principles, and automate operations across campus, branch, and remote environments, including operational technology (OT) domains. Enterprise wired and wireless LAN infrastructures solve the operational complexity of delivering secure, scalable connectivity across distributed enterprise environments. As organizations expand across campus, branch, remote, and operational technology domains, traditional network deployment and management approaches become too resource-intensive and inconsistent to meet business demands. The offered capabilities address the business problem of fragmented network operations by unifying life cycle management (that is, provisioning, monitoring, policy enforcement, and incident response) into a single, software-driven system. This reduces manual effort, shortens resolution times, and improves compliance with governance and security requirements. While hardware remains foundational, it is the infrastructure operations software (that is, automation, telemetry, and policy orchestration) that delivers the operational and business value enterprises seek. Tangible outcomes include faster site turn-up, proactive issue detection and remediation, consistent user experience, and alignment of network operations with enterprise workflows through IT service management (ITSM) integration. Organizations also gain flexibility through cloud, on-premises, hybrid, and network as a service (NaaS) consumption models, enabling them to scale operations efficiently while maintaining control over data and performance.
Platform-native consumption services (PNCS) are multidomain, consumption-based, as-a-service offerings for enterprise mission-critical infrastructure. PNCS vendors’ platform and product capabilities provide API-centric control planes for SLA-based IT operations life cycle management and support. PNCS offerings include storage as a service (STaaS), compute as a service (CaaS), network as a service (NaaS), and data protection service offerings, including backup, archive and ransomware detection. PNCS vendors use artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) infrastructure telemetry, software and automation tools to provide proactive SLA management. IT outcomes include improved productivity, cyber-resilience and continuous workload infrastructure cost optimization. PNCS provides a hybrid IT operations platform approach to on-premises consumption-based as-a-service offerings in lieu of centralizing mission-critical infrastructure on the public cloud. PNCS vendors provide as-a-service offerings such as STaaS, CaaS and NaaS to enable IT operations to shift from capital expenditure (capex) to consumption for the benefits of an on-premises hybrid platform operating model. Major benefits that PNCS solutions provide include asset cost optimization, productivity improvement, sustainability and cyber-resilience SLAs that substantially improve IT operations. As a result, customers enjoy a more flexible usage model that meets business and IT operations demands. Other benefits include asset financing and management capabilities that favorably alter the economics of asset utilization. Use case examples include STaaS, CaaS, NaaS, data protection as a service such as ransomware protection or recovery, and higher levels of platform as a service (PaaS) services such as database as a service (DBaaS).