Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As enterprise IT continues to evolve, networking is becoming a strategic lever – one that directly impacts agility, resilience and the ability to compete. In a recent podcast episode, our CTO Paul Gampe shares the technologies he thinks will matter most for the foreseeable future. Three themes stood out: the rise of Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), the shift toward transmission on-demand at layer one and the rapid evolution of Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Whenever service management has struggled, the conventional response was to add processes, tools, and people. That worked for a little while; at the very least, it worked well enough to keep the lights on. However, today’s environments don’t fail quietly or occasionally. They fail noisily and across tightly coupled systems. The end result is an operational model where human effort is consumed reconstructing context instead of resolving problems. More processes don’t fix that.

Think about how airlines assign seats on a plane. Some have extra legroom. Some sit near exits. Some are cheaper, while others cost a premium. Certain passengers also have strict requirements, like families traveling together or travelers who paid for a specific class. Now imagine boarding everyone randomly. A passenger who paid for extra legroom (perhaps for health reasons) ends up squeezed into a middle seat. Families scatter across the cabin. Premium seats sit half empty while the back rows overflow.

Manual mTLS vs. Service Mesh: Which is right for your Kubernetes cluster? Explore the operational risks of manual setups and the benefits of node-based encryption.