With the end of the year quickly approaching, industry pundits will undoubtedly start promoting views on the hottest technologies for 2025. Here’s a spoiler alert: AI will dominate these lists.
We’re already in the thick of it. Watching or reading business, financial, or technology media without seeing those two letters is impossible.
But how does this new technology coexist with quiet IT? And how will AI impact the market? Pick whatever metric you’d like. It’s clear that billions of dollars in AI investments are coming to fruition, and the use of AI will extend beyond early adopters to enterprises of all sizes.
AI is clearly a transformative technology. Security is always the underlying challenge whenever businesses go through a transformational moment. The number one question I hear is how enterprises can implement AI solutions securely, with less risk, and at a lower cost.
Can AI and Quiet IT Coexist?
Early adopters’ approach to AI must shift dramatically for mainstream adoption. Early adopters take risks, often leading to internal and external disruption. Early adoptions often over-allocate investments in new technologies like AI. This affords opportunities to stress IT systems to their limits. With early adopters, profit can be secondary to growing users.
The vast majority of enterprises can’t approach AI the same way. Mainstream businesses, first and foremost, value Quiet IT. IT-related business disruptions represent a make-or-break moment. Quiet IT is the process of optimizing IT infrastructures from vision to execution to enable cost-effective, scalable, secure, low-risk, and compliant systems. When IT isn’t quiet, it can be expensive, and this is the most significant concern for AI in reaching mainstream adoption.
But how do we get there?
What Comes First, Infrastructure or Security?
AI is complex. IT is complex. Security is complex. Attempting to plan, build, test, and deploy any of these complexities using the same approaches we’ve used in the past will lead to failure.
For most, this is a departure from how security has been traditionally viewed. IT systems were built to support business processes and security solutions were built on top. In the age of AI, security comes first. This is the only way to limit complexities, lower total costs, and reduce risk. This thought process was developed directly from feedback from clients. Their focus now is no matter what the problem is, we need to lead with security. Security is now the tip of the spear for helping organizations prepare for change, regardless of what that change is.
What’s the Best Security Solution for AI?
First, we must recognize that IT security is a broad concept with thousands of offerings spanning firewalls, antivirus, IDPS, encryption, IAM, SIEM, and endpoint protection.
Clients aren’t struggling with a lack of technology options. They struggle with ROI, adoption, management, and new outsourcing models. At the same time, the landscape for ransomware and hacking is evolving faster than ever.
Because of this, we see up to 40% of IT spending around security being shelved and money wasted.
In today’s world, there is no best security solution that can be broadly applied across the IT landscape. Clients use customized cloud and data center technologies and customized software and services to generate specific business results. Security needs to be baked in at the beginning with this in mind.
This will make many in the industry cringe, but the best security solution is vendor-agnostic. It is a unique approach that some clients are initially reluctant to adopt. Stand-alone security solutions are the proverbial hammer, and every security issue is a nail. We all know this isn’t reality.
Getting Back to Quiet IT
AI – and its impact on how clients view security – will represent a transformational moment for businesses of all sizes. However, many clients are concerned about the risk associated with the speed of adoption, cost of adoption, and value of adopting AI.
It’s important to understand that clients have successfully navigated through transformational risk and security issues many times in the past.
The disruption created by the Internet created security issues. As did other transformational technologies, including Cloud Computing, IoT, eCommerce, robotics, automation, 5G, and edge computing.
The only difference between previous disruptions and AI is that clients can achieve Quiet IT faster with a security-first approach. Systems will be more stable, cost-optimized, compliant, secure, scalable, and have lower risks. Systems will also be better prepared to handle whatever the next transformational moment is.
Interested in learning more about security in the era of AI? Talk to one of our experts.
