As digital transformation accelerates, enterprises are dealing with legacy infrastructure and fragmented IT operations, while regulatory pressures and security threats continue to increase. The adoption of AI and automation is essential to stay competitive and sustain core business functions.
The result is a digital ecosystem that’s harder to scale and govern. Traditional architectures can’t keep up with the pace or complexity of modern demands. To move forward, enterprises need a common foundation with shared frameworks that reduce risk, streamline operations and make room for continuous innovation. Automation, for example, enables services to be deployed much faster. What used to take months now takes minutes with the right automation in place.
For sustainable transformation, aligning around shared principles — interoperability, automation and trust — helps to reduce risk, accelerate execution and create room for growth.
Interoperability and Service Orchestration
A major obstacle for enterprise IT teams is the lack of interoperability. Today’s networked services span multiple clouds, edge locations and on-premises systems. Each environment brings unique security and compliance needs, making cohesive service delivery difficult.
Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO), developed and advanced by Mplify, formerly MEF, offers a path through this complexity. With standardized and certified APIs and consistent service definitions, LSO supports automated provisioning and service management across environments and enables seamless interoperability between providers and platforms.
When widely adopted, this approach improves operational consistency and reduces the friction of managing dynamic, software-defined services. For IT leaders, this translates into shorter deployment cycles and less overhead. It’s a practical step toward a more agile and scalable infrastructure.
Bringing Clarity to Cybersecurity with SASE
Cybersecurity now touches every corner of the enterprise. Secure access service edge (SASE) has emerged as a way to unify networking and security, blending concepts like software-defined WAN, zero trust and security service edge. But the landscape is still fragmented with offerings that differ widely in how they’re built and how well they integrate.
Certification helps cut through that noise. A clear, independently validated SASE certification enables organizations to evaluate options based on proven functionality, not just marketing. It also ensures that core components work together in real-world scenarios.
This becomes even more important in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Enterprises need confidence that their policies are enforced consistently and that user experiences remain seamless. Certified SASE offerings give them that assurance.
AI Infrastructure Requires More Than Compute
AI is moving beyond the pilot stage, but many enterprise networks aren’t built to support it. Workloads like real-time inference or large-scale model training require high throughput, low latency and access to GPU resources that most current architectures weren’t designed to provide.
Operationalizing AI means rethinking infrastructure. Standards-based approaches, such as GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS), paired with orchestration frameworks, enable enterprises to bring compute closer to their data and manage deployments with greater precision. This flexibility is key to performance and compliance.
At the same time, AI introduces new governance concerns. How do teams maintain visibility across environments? How can they ensure policies follow AI agents from cloud to edge? Without standardized controls and certification, organizations risk losing control just as these workloads scale.
Network-as-a-Service: Unlocking the Model
To meet today’s agility requirements, many enterprises are exploring network-as-a-service (NaaS). By abstracting networking into programmable, on-demand offerings, NaaS simplifies operations and gives organizations more control over how they consume connectivity.
But the benefits only materialize if NaaS is built on a shared foundation. Without common APIs or validated performance standards, it risks becoming another fragmented solution stack. Enterprises adopting NaaS should prioritize providers who align with open, standardized frameworks, ensuring long-term scalability and ecosystem compatibility.
Why Certification and Standards are Strategic
In a world of constant change, standards and certification are strategic necessities. They help enterprise leaders, future-proof infrastructure, reduce integration risk and maintain operational stability without slowing innovation.
By reuniting around proven frameworks, organizations can modernize more confidently. Certification provides a layer of trust, ensuring solutions meet real-world requirements and work across the environments that enterprises rely on most.
Enterprise IT teams are under pressure to innovate faster, do more with less and quickly respond to change. None of that is sustainable without an infrastructure that’s secure, flexible and built to interoperate.
Standards and certification offer a way to cut through the complexity so networks, services and AI deployments can evolve without introducing new risks. Enterprises that succeed won’t be the ones asking whether to adopt LSO, SASE or GPUaaS, but rather finding smart, swift ways to put them into practice.
Editor’s note: This article is part of our regular series of articles from the industry experts at Mplify, formerly MEF.
Nan Chen, CEO at Mplify, formerly MEF, is a tech entrepreneur, world traveler and avid runner. Nan founded and serves as CEO of Mplify, the organization that defines, certifies and federates global communications/internet services. Nan also founded CENX (acquired by Ericsson), which pioneered an industry-first service assurance solution using AI/ML automation. His previous ventures include Atrica (acquired by Nokia) and SynOptics/Bay Networks (acquired by Nortel). Nan has been recognized regularly as one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Telecom/Internet Industry.
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