By Jimmy Nilsson and Vivek Vijay
The AI revolution is pushing companies to transform their tech stacks, with 88% of businesses adopting AI for at least one operational function, and 38% scaling or having fully scaled AI deployment. The large data pipelines, APIs and third-party integrations that come with AI implementation significantly expand network attack surface across edge, campus, data center and multi‑cloud environments.
Yet many organizations lack cohesive governance to ensure network components remain secure from manipulation, theft and leakage. Even as network fabric becomes complex and threats mount, companies continue to rely on slow, siloed and fragmented processes for security. Less than 40% of enterprise leaders feel their organization’s cybersecurity measures are ready to handle future risks.
Building a unified, cross-functional security posture across the physical and virtual network is a good way for enterprises that adopt AI to ensure ongoing safety for the organization’s data and workflows. Using this approach transforms network security from a cost center to a driver of business value and sets organizations on a path toward enabling further upgrades to the tech stack. In this way, pushing for unified network and security is a powerful method of improving enterprise operations.
The business value of unified network and security
A unified, asset-focused, network‑anchored approach enables organizations to maintain security while moving faster and staying resilient through several key features:
- Cross-functional approach: Embeds security and network policy across departments rather than confining it to IT, which reduces shadow AI, unmanaged identities and blind spots in traffic monitoring.
- Task clarity: Facilitates a better understanding of the factors that enable employees to perform their jobs efficiently, which in turn informs network and security architecture, such as the need for single sign-on (SSO) authentication technology to streamline employees’ work.
- Shared visibility: Prioritizes shared visibility, collaborative workflows and automated processes for network outages and security breaches so enterprises can move quickly and react more effectively to such incidents.
The transformation of security into a cross-functional endeavor can translate into institutional support for other upgrades to the tech stack. This approach facilitates using existing tools in smarter, more connected ways, and prioritizes investing in new tools that will substantially shift the organization’s overall security posture instead of addressing isolated problems with network and cloud architectures. This approach also enables robust compliance and effective risk management.
A five-step methodology for unified security
The following five-step methodology emphasizes optimization of existing tools and capabilities:
Understand the assets
Securing the most critical business assets and the network paths that deliver them is the core project of a unified approach. Assets are foundational systems such as electronic health records for healthcare providers, ERP platforms for manufacturers and financial transaction systems for banks. Taking a unified, strategic approach means putting these essential business assets at the center of security planning instead of letting shifts in available security tools and technologies dictate planning.
Optimal security architecture will address the unique vulnerabilities of each of these systems within the modern networked business environment. Map the assets and the network flows you are trying to protect, as well as the workloads that build up those assets across cloud, on-premises and SaaS environments. Capture compliance and supply chain requirements, and assess what elements partners need to access.
Prevent threats
Detailing the normal functioning of each asset enables the creation of purpose-built protections. The daily users of critical assets know what functions allow these systems to be most useful to the business, while IT teams understand how these systems operate and handle workloads on a technical level. Both these perspectives must be represented in security planning. Additionally, the shared visibility and agility resulting from this network and security collaboration enable broader coverage and tighter alignment with business objectives. Applying this insight can enable the creation of customized enforcement policies that dictate which behaviors to allow and which to block or investigate.
Detect and respond
With the enforcement policy in place, you can create detection rules for behaviors that deviate from normal usage. For example, if there are an atypical number of visitors from multiple sources, the system would flag the pattern as potentially problematic. Through this process, you can build an optimized network outage and threat detection system tailored to specific assets, enabling faster and more accurate responses to potential breaches.
Detection and response require tight collaboration, with teams guided by the same methodology and operating model. An example is coordinating the processes and systems used by the Network Operations Center (NOC) and the Security Operations Center (SOC) teams so they can exchange information to determine whether an irregular incident in a business asset is a threat and how to address it. That coordination requires collaboration among business users and IT teams in defining regular and expected use of business assets. In complex environments, establishing such a dialed-in approach is now nonnegotiable.
Recover effectively
Enable that the organization has the necessary resources and procedures to restore operations quickly after a breach, using the asset-specific insights already captured in earlier steps to ensure full and fast recovery. Focus on continuous modernization, diversification of vendors and proactive security hardening to ensure ongoing resilience. Ensure that the incident response and incident recovery teams are well-coordinated to facilitate fast and thorough action after an incident. Develop multi-region architectures, employ multi-cloud strategies, use hybrid cloud to increase control of data and establish contingencies for third-party outages in SaaS products.
Automate proactively
Automation must become the backbone of network and security operations — anticipating risks, enforcing compliance and enabling real‑time visibility. Enterprises can unify observability, security and operations into an intelligent workflow. Agentic AI shifts automation toward creating proactive, adaptive networks that learn, respond and recover at digital speed. In this way, automation can become a catalyst for continuous transformation.
Stronger together
Fragmented approaches to security can no longer keep up with the threats in today’s fast-moving business world, presenting enterprises with an urgent need to build cross-functional teams focused on protecting critical assets first.
Cultivating a unified, cross-functional security posture will set you on the path to ensuring organizational resilience and agility in today’s fast-evolving business world. Resilience depends on this unified fabric.
Kyndryl helps enterprises modernize networks and security together through continuous, automated monitoring and real-time visibility across network, cloud and security environments. This unified approach simplifies operations, strengthens compliance and builds resilience for AI-driven and hybrid environments—helping organizations reduce risk and protect what matters.
Learn more about how Kyndryl helps enterprises modernize securely and mitigate cyber risk.
