The PGA European Tour hosts 40 professional golf tournaments annually in more than 30 countries. Stops include Australia, South Africa, China and Dubai. For everything to run smoothly, IT staffers need to set up a new network in an entirely new location on a nearly weekly basis.
“The PGA European Tour faced increasing vulnerability from an expanding threat landscape,” said CTO Michael Cole. “This underscored the critical need to strengthen protection of player and consumer data, safeguard our corporate reputation, and effectively manage the complexities of our finances and operations across a labyrinth of stakeholders.”
“Prior to 2022, we had simply stitched together too many point solutions, and, over time, the seams were starting to show — manual integration, inconsistent policies, and limited automation,” he added. “We needed a simpler, more reliable security posture, where networking and security worked together by design, managed via a common interface and delivered by a single partner.”
PGA European Tour (recently rebranded as the DP World Tour) selected Fortinet as that partner, and Cole launched a three-phase platformization effort. In 2023, he deployed a foundation layer of security with FortiGate next-gen firewalls, FortiMail email protection, FortiClient endpoint protection and FortiAnalyzer security analytics and log management. In 2024, he added Fortinet’s SD-WAN and SASE services. And this year he is focusing on automation and AI with Fortinet’s SecOps platform.
The approach is paying dividends, says Cole. “We’ve cut setup time at new venues from days to hours. Policy enforcement is consistent across all locations. And with centralized visibility, we can manage global operations without stretching our team thin. The platform has given us both resilience and speed—something we couldn’t achieve with a fragmented solution approach.”
More than simply mitigating risk, the converged security and network platform is helping the organization accelerate its digital transformation efforts and is enabling increased workforce agility and productivity, he says.
Revisting the platform vs. point solutions debate
The dilemma of whether to deploy an assortment of best-of-breed products from multiple vendors or go with a unified platform of “good enough” tools from a single vendor has vexed IT execs forever.
Today, the pendulum is swinging toward the platform approach for three key reasons. First, complexity, driven by the increasingly distributed nature of enterprise networks, has emerged as a top challenge facing IT execs. Second, the lines between networking and security are blurring, particularly as organizations deploy zero trust network access (ZTNA). And third, to reap the benefits of AIOps, generative AI and agentic AI, organizations need a unified data store.
“The era of enterprise connectivity platforms is upon us,” says IDC analyst Brandon Butler. “Organizations are increasingly adopting platform-based approaches to their enterprise connectivity infrastructure to overcome complexity and unlock new business value. When enhanced by AI, enterprise platforms can increase productivity, enrich end-user experiences, enhance security, and ultimately drive new opportunities for innovation.”
In IDC’s Worldwide AI in Networking Special Report, 78% of survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “I am moving to an AI-powered platform approach for networking.”
Gartner predicts that 70% of enterprises will select a broad platform for new multi-cloud networking software deployments by 2027, an increase from 10% in early 2024. The breakdown of silos between network and security operations will be driven by organizations implementing zero-trust principles as well as the adoption of AI and AIOps. “In the future, enterprise networks will be increasingly automated, AI-assisted and more tightly integrated with security across LAN, data center and WAN domains,” according to Gartner’s 2025 Strategic Roadmap for Enterprise Networking.
While all of the major networking vendors have announced cloud-based platforms, it’s still relatively early days. For example, Cisco announced a general framework for Cisco Networking Cloud in mid-2023, Palo Alto Networks announced its platformization strategy in early 2024, and Extreme launched Platform One in December 2024. (See sidebar for a snapshot of vendor platforms.)
The good news for enterprise IT is that platformization is not an all-or-nothing proposition – it’s a journey.
Adopting single-vendor SASE is a step on the road to platformization. So is integrating endpoint protection and next-gen security into Extended Detection and Response (XDR), or merging SD-WAN and 5G into SD-Branch. There can be separate platforms for domains such as IoT, WAN and data center. In other words, organizations can deploy mini-platforms, based on the most pressing business or security needs, and stitch them together over time into an enterprise-wide platform.
What is a network platform?
Butler defines a network platform as “an integrated system that combines hardware, software, policy, and open APIs with an intuitive user interface, advanced telemetry, and automation.” A platform should have these key attributes, says Butler:
- Integrated visibility: This is vital for monitoring and analyzing network performance and end-user experiences. Telemetry data should be fed into an analytics engine that can identify issues and provide either guided or automatic remediation.
- Extensibility: Network platforms should be extensible and modular so that new services can be added incrementally and so that the platform itself can expand beyond one domain to multiple domains.
- Support for cloud operating models: The platform should enable the network team to use cloud principles for managing IT resources whether the actual systems are on prem, in the cloud or part of a hybrid approach.
“Platformization combines numerous products and services into a unified architecture with a single data store, streamlined management and operations, and native integrations that make each component stronger than a corresponding ‘best-of-breed’ point product,” says Anand Oswal, general manager of network security at Palo Alto Networks. “This offers a great user experience that increases productivity, radically simplifies operations, and improves security outcomes.”
The caveat, cautions Oswal, is that “every product or service consolidated into the platform must be as good or better than the corresponding point products. Adopting a platform can never mean sacrificing security efficacy for simplified management or vendor consolidation.”
Platform pros and cons
Platformization can deliver benefits to stakeholders beyond networking and security teams, including business units, procurement, risk management, compliance and finance.
On the business side, platformization is “a key enabler of running a successful digital business at scale,” says Butler. A platform enables the business to be more efficient, more agile and to take advantage of new technologies like genAI for business benefit.
Shifting from a collection of point products from multiple vendors to a unified platform opens the doors to other benefits. Through open APIs, organizations can build an ecosystem of IT and business applications, data and users. This can facilitate innovation and collaboration between teams, data sources and management tools.
Platforms enable more predictable IT costs. And they enable strategic thinking when it comes to major moves like shifting to the cloud or taking a NaaS approach.
On a more operational level, platforms break down siloes. It enables visibility and analytics, management and automation of networking and IT resources. And it simplifies lifecycle management of hardware, software, firmware and security patches.
Platforms also enhance the benefits of AIOps by creating a comprehensive data lake of telemetry information across domains. This makes is easier for AIOps systems to analyze network health, optimize network efficiency, remediate existing issues and help prevent issues from coming up through predictive analysis.
One concern about platforms centers around whether the platform provider has the capability to develop cutting-edge new products. Typically, startups lead the way when it comes to creating new product categories, such as SD-WAN. Incumbent vendors often get caught flatfooted and end up acquiring a startup and then integrating its capabilities, which takes time and doesn’t always go smoothly.
The other concern relates to vendor lock-in. What happens if the vendor unexpectedly raises prices or changes licensing conditions? What happens if the vendor lags behind on updating its legacy product portfolio because it has little incentive to do so? How disruptive would it be to have to switch platform vendors?
Chris Biggers, CIO at Distinctive Resorts, which owns and operates three “laid-back luxury” oceanside hotels in central California, argues that “vendor lock-in can be an advantage.”
Biggers explains: “We used to run a different platform for each property. Each of our hotels had random, off-the-shelf networking products. There was no insight into analytics, security or management. Guest Wi-Fi received daily complaints about reliability and speed. There was little or no closed-circuit television. There was no environmental monitoring.”
After evaluating several vendors, Biggers decided to take a platform approach with Cisco. “We overhauled our entire organization with Cisco Meraki,” he says, including 160 Wi-Fi access points, 70 network switches, Cisco Secure Endpoint to protect 220 endpoints, Cisco Duo for authentication, Meraki environmental monitoring software, and Meraki appliances for SD-WAN – all managed through Meraki’s cloud management system.
“We have an agreement with Cisco which makes budgeting easy and CapEx planning simple,” Biggers says. “We can add additional devices with no licensing penalties. We match our enterprise agreement to the lifecycles of Meraki equipment so that we are getting timely upgrades.”
Another key benefit is that Biggers’ small IT staff doesn’t need to be trained on multiple platforms. “Training is vastly simplified and streamlined. This results in lower administrative costs and burdens,” he says.
When it comes to keeping up with new technologies, Biggers says his team benefits from taking the platform approach. For example, the new Cisco Meraki MX security cameras now come with built-in AI advanced analytics at no additional licensing costs, he says. “We can associate our network switches with environmental monitoring and tie it in with cameras – so if there is a water leak detected in a server room, we can create an alert and quickly investigate the cause through a single platform. This is an obvious time saver and again, reduces administrative burdens and costs while enhancing network uptime and reliability.”
“Enterprise grade equipment paired with a single pane of glass management is key for organizations that wish to simplify their network management,” he adds.
What to look for in a platform provider
The first step toward platformization is to identify and prioritize the challenges that the organization faces and determine whether the platform under consideration will address them.
These challenges could include lack of operational efficiency stemming from siloed management of IT infrastructure assets, lack of common data for AI models, difficulty incorporating new technologies, need to improve connectivity experiences for end users, need to better respond to changing market conditions, and staffing/skills shortages.
It’s important to consider the extensibility of the platform, including its ability to unify management, visibility and assurance across networking domains; add new services; and integrate across other IT systems through open APIs, says Butler.
Finally, make sure that the platform can support the company’s long-term IT strategy for on-prem, cloud and hybrid management. And make sure that the platform aligns IT capabilities with business needs across departments.
Source:: Network World