Top 3 Reasons Organizations Are Ditching Traditional Wired and Wireless Infrastructure

Legacy Edge and Access Networking Have Become Overly Complex

Over the past 30 years, networking has evolved far beyond its original purpose. What once started as simple packet forwarding has now expanded to support real-time transport, full visibility, and stringent security requirements. While these advancements have enabled greater capabilities, they have also introduced significant complexity and cost to traditional network architectures.

Many organizations are realizing that maintaining a legacy wired and wireless network comes with significant operational burdens. Instead of continuing to struggle with outdated processes, security gaps, and unpredictable costs, forward-thinking businesses are shifting their focus toward modern, simplified networking solutions—like those delivered by Nile and Red8.

Here are the top three reasons why organizations are shifting away from traditional networking:

1. Operational Relief

Managing a traditional network is a never-ending cycle of renewals, patches, upgrades, and troubleshooting. IT teams are burdened with maintaining infrastructure rather than focusing on initiatives that drive business outcomes. The key operational challenges include:

• Lifecycle Management – Constant tracking of dates, software releases, compatibility, and maintenance windows require significant time, energy, and resources. This is an area of great frustration and usually results in inaccurate data.
• Tooling Complexity – I often see mid-sized organizations leveraging 5+ tools to manage wired and wireless networking, while larger organizations need 10-12+ and still have gaps. Each is expensive and difficult to integrate.
• Talent Shortage – Networking expertise has become scarce. We are seeing many experienced network engineers retiring or shifting to a new technology while the next generation engineer is not being trained or interested in networking.
• Process Overhead – Escalation management, troubleshooting, and incident response are time-consuming. This leaves IT teams in reactive mode chasing KPIs while missing critical maintenance activity, in the end… a less than ideal user experience.

2. Network Security Challenges

In legacy networks, security is often an afterthought, requiring bolt-on solutions that increase complexity and cost. Protecting these environments is challenging, disjointed, and unreliable. Key issues include:

• Lack of Integrated Security – Legacy networks rely on piecemeal security solutions that don’t work cohesively.
• East-West Traffic Visibility – Lateral movement of threats is challenging to detect and control.
• Guest Network Exposure – Managing guest access securely without creating vulnerabilities is a struggle.
• VLAN/Subnet Management – Micro-segmentation is complex and requires ongoing maintenance.
• Device Visibility Issues – Traditional networks do not have complete visibility into what’s connecting and communicating.
• NAC Complexity – Traditional Network Access Control (NAC) is expensive and difficult to deploy.
• No Native Authentication – Users and devices connect without inherent identity validation, increasing risk.

All these technologies were developed with good intentions and can be managed to deliver solid security outcomes. However, their complexity stems from how they were introduced… reactively, as networks evolved. Traditional networks were designed for connectivity first, with security and visibility added later as afterthoughts. This incremental approach has led to high-maintenance security architectures that require constant integration and oversight.

3. Predictable Spending

Traditional networking models force organizations to overbuild infrastructure based on peak usage projections, resulting in significant wasted capacity and unpredictable spending. The common financial pain points include:

• Unplanned Upgrade Costs – Compatibility issues lead to unexpected hardware refresh cycles.
• Uncertainty in Business Outcomes – IT teams struggle to align network performance with evolving business needs.
• Over-Provisioning Waste – Organizations pay for full-scale capacity but only use a fraction of it.

Many organizations that Red8 talks to struggle to balance infrastructure investments with peak capacity needs, often at a high cost. Traditional models force compromises, leading to less-than-ideal designs, limited scalability, and unexpected expenses when capacity falls short or exceeds projections.

Why Organizations Are Turning to Nile and Red8

Traditional networking vendors have spent decades improving coverage, capacity, and availability, but this has resulted in increased complexity, higher operational overhead, and a need for specialized expertise. While legacy solutions can work, we see that they require extensive resources to deploy, manage, and secure.

Nile takes a fundamentally different approach. Their network-as-a-service model, Nile Access Service eliminates complexity by delivering:

• Performance Guarantees – A financially-backed coverage, capacity, and availability performance guarantee ensures that your network and users are operating at their best.
• Security Built into its DNA – No bolt-ons—Campus Zero Trust is natively integrated at every layer from re-designed Infrastructure to Access and Policy layers.
• AI-Driven Automation – Leveraging big data, AI, and closed-loop automation to create a self-healing and self-optimizing network.

Red8 has seen customers realize significant benefits with Nile, often exceeding their initial expectations. While the service may sound too good to be true, every customer we’ve worked with has experienced tangible improvements after deployment:

• Enhanced Security – Network and security teams are better aligned, delivering stronger protection without added complexity.
• Reduced Operational Overhead – Many organizations have been able to downsize or eliminate monitoring, security, and visibility tools, lowering both costs and management effort.
• Minimized Downtime – With no need for scheduled maintenance or disruptive upgrades, organizations experience fewer outages and improved reliability.
• Predictable Spending – Customers gain financial clarity with a consumption-based model that delivers lower, measurable TCO.

These benefits are consistent across all deployments.

For the first time, organizations can eliminate the endless cycle of patching, troubleshooting, and maintaining complex environments—and instead embrace a fully autonomous network.

Let Red8 and Nile show You What’s Possible

If you’re tired of dealing with network complexity, unpredictable costs, and security gaps, let’s have a conversation. Red8 and Nile are redefining networking for modern businesses—eliminating unnecessary burdens and enabling IT teams to focus on what truly matters.

Are you ready to experience a smarter, simpler, and more secure network? Let’s connect.