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The Growing Disconnect Between Connectivity and Security
Campus networking solutions have long focused on one business outcome: providing secure, seamless access to users, devices, and applications over both wired and wireless infrastructure. Whether an employee is accessing enterprise applications from a corporate device or a student is connecting a personal laptop to campus Wi-Fi, the expectation is simple—the network should just work.
Likewise, enterprise IoT and OT devices must communicate securely with controllers, applications, and other devices, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Users and devices don’t want to think about network security; they just want secured connectivity without friction.
Behind the scenes, IT and security teams shoulder the responsibility for designing, implementing, and maintaining an infrastructure that ensures connectivity is reliable, performant, and secure throughout its lifecycle. They must continuously evaluate capacity, coverage, and availability while simultaneously enforcing the security posture of the network and adapting to evolving threat landscapes, preventing breaches, lateral movement, and unauthorized access.
The big challenge organizations face today? The increasing complexity of modern networks makes achieving this balance between seamless connectivity and security incredibly difficult.
The Challenges of Securing Today’s Networks
As enterprises embrace Zero Trust strategies to strengthen security across all users and devices, traditional networking models face significant challenges. While today’s networking models have evolved over decades, they weren’t designed with Zero Trust principles in mind. As enterprises pivot to security-first architectures, these legacy systems reveal significant shortcomings.
- Insider Threats Are Rising: According to the Ponemon 2025 Cost of Insider Threats Global Report, insider incidents now cost organizations $17.4 million annually. Corporate endpoints and unmanaged IoT devices are cited as the top risks.
- Zero Trust Programs Are Complex: A recent Gartner report warns that many Zero Trust initiatives are being abandoned mid-journey due to the complexity of integrating traditional platforms to support zero trust principles.
The crux of the issue? Today’s feature-rich networking solutions are designed for enabling open networking — optimized for connectivity, not Zero Trust security. Bolting on identity and security systems on top of these solutions leads to complex architectures, inconsistent policy enforcement, and high operational overhead. These lead to a number of operational and architectural challenges.
- Disparate Platforms & Complex Configurations
The modern campus infrastructure includes a mix of APs, switches, gateways, firewalls, SD-WAN/routers, and user experience sensors. Each of these is often designed as a standalone product line, each with its own extensive software feature sets, roadmaps, and maintenance cycles. Designed with configurability in mind, each requires IT personnel to develop and maintain expertise to manage configurations and ensure continuous interworking.
- Constant Upgrades
Maintaining multiple product lines requires continuous patching and upgrades, particularly when they involve security updates and addressing known vulnerabilities. Missing or delaying a routine update can substantially increase exploitation which can result in substantial financial, compliance, or reputation risk. In addition to the resourcing required to patch all systems continuously, IT also needs to track and validate inter-platform compatibility to ensure proper interworking post upgrade, without sacrificing performance or capacity.
- Complex System Integrations
Enforcing Zero Trust principles in networks is not just about hardware—it involves an intricate ecosystem of integrations between various systems that provide device fingerprinting, identity, localized real-time context, access control, and policy as well as networking equipment and controllers, such as MDM, EDR, SIEM, AD/IdP, and NAC. While integration with these software systems helps create a more holistic security approach that is capable of supporting Zero Trust, this approach introduces challenges including resource-consuming integration projects, dedicated IT expertise for ongoing maintenance and upkeep, and release compatibility tracking.
- Network Segmentation Manageability
Best practices dictate segmenting networks into smaller communities of interest and limiting lateral movement in case of a breach. Traditionally, VLANs have been used to enforce segmentation, but VLANs themselves do not prevent lateral movement. Defining smaller sized VLANs to better align with Zero Trust principles significantly increases complexity and management overhead. VLANs also limit policy portability—ensuring Zero Trust security policies that remain intact regardless of where or how a user or device connects adds complexity when based on VLAN technology.
- Least-Privilege Access is Elusive
Zero Trust principles demand fine-grained identity-based access control, ensuring users and devices only have the minimum permissions necessary. Conditional enforcement based on real-time contextual information, regardless of whether connectivity is wired or wireless, is also crucial to ensure continuous enforcement. However, deploying solutions using traditional networking and firewalls alongside systems like NAC that can provide identity and policy management uniformly across users and devices creates substantial operational complexity and overhead for most enterprises.
- Overly Broad Attack Surface
Attackers exploit weaknesses wherever they can be found – in misconfigured systems, unused services, unpatched vulnerabilities, open exposed ports, etc., as well as methods that involve the human element such as via social engineering and stolen credentials. According to the 2023 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 74% of breaches involved human elements like misconfigurations or stolen credentials, making humans the weakest link in cybersecurity.
Today’s campus networks comprise traditional networking equipment built for openness, feature-richness, and extensibility, not for Zero Trust security. This establishes a broad attack surface that requires a concerted effort to minimize. While identity-based access policy is important in a Zero Trust architecture, preventing uninvited attacks on the network from the outside as well as inside is also paramount.
With security designed as options and as bolt-on solutions to traditional networks, enforcing Zero Trust at the infrastructure layer requires extensive and continuous hardening to prevent external and internal threats that prevent lateral movement across these systems’ vast attack surface.
- IT Talent Shortages
Network and security teams are expected to implement Zero Trust, support digital transformation, and maintain operational uptime—all with limited resources. With new emerging strategic initiatives, enterprises are left with overburdened IT teams that often lack the bandwidth to implement, manage, and maintain a campus network that not only delivers seamless connectivity but which minimizes security risk and complies with Zero Trust guidelines.
The Bottom Line: Traditional Networking Is No Longer Enough
The reality is clear—traditional campus networking models are struggling to keep pace with Zero Trust security mandates. Organizations attempting to retrofit traditional architectures to meet modern security needs are finding the process expensive, complex, and, in many cases, unsustainable without substantial investments in people and technology.
Rather than bolting security on top of an open network, enterprises must rethink how campus networks are built. It’s time for a vertically integrated approach—one that embeds security natively into every layer of the network fabric, delivering Zero Trust by design.
In the next installment, we define the principles and layers of Campus Zero Trust, explore how this new framework can transform enterprise networking, and how Nile delivers Campus Zero Trust through vertical integration.
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