Letter from Gregg

Chapter headingChapter subheadingAI compressed decades of change into months. Integrated network and security have been on roadmaps for years. AI moved it from intention to execution.Gregg Rowe, Globalgig’s Chief Channel Officer, breaks down why the conversation needs to shift.Contents

Thank you for reading Letter from Gregg

At the end of each year, I take a step back to look at how things have evolved.
2025 stands out as a turning point.

A note from Gregg, Global Head of Channel Relationships,

Ready or Not, Welcome to the New Era

2025 was the year artificial intelligence (AI) exploded, bringing with it the realization that we had entered a new era.

History offers useful parallels: the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century, electrification in the late 19th century, and the internet in the late 20th century. Each fundamentally reshaped society and business, typically separated by roughly a century.

AI arrived just two decades after the internet, compressing investment, disruption, innovation, excitement, and fear into a far shorter timeframe.

AI compressed decades of change into a few short years.

Zero Trust isn’t a product. It’s an operating model.

The concept emerged in the 1990s, and the term was formalized in 2009 by John Kindervag, then a Forrester analyst. It’s an evolving methodology implemented through both process and technology. Many organizations have adopted elements of Zero Trust, but few operate a comprehensive Zero Trust architecture across all protected surfaces.

In the AI age, that’s no longer optional. It’s foundational. As threat actors leverage AI to accelerate attacks, Zero Trust is surfacing in conversations that didn’t start as security deals. Network upgrades, cloud migrations, and SD-WAN deployments now require Zero Trust foundations.

But here’s where most organizations get stuck: they spend months mapping complex, multi-vendor Zero Trust architectures and trying to coordinate policies across disconnected tools. Why does this approach keep failing?

Globalgig exists to solve enterprises’ network and cybersecurity problems, and nowhere is the impact of AI more apparent.

Attackers have always been innovators, and they have now fully adopted AI.From automated reconnaissance to entirely new attack vectors such as prompt injection, the threat landscape is evolving rapidly.

Fortunately, defenders are responding. Security leaders like Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Zscaler have invested billions in acquiring and building AI-driven security capabilities that simply did not exist a few years ago.

Attackers and defenders are advancing in parallel, and the speed of that change is reshaping how security decisions get made.

Why This Matters for Security

Zero Trust

Standardization is the second critical principle, particularly when contrasted with a traditional “best of breed” strategy. While best of breed has long been respected, it often results in excessive complexity as security and networking stacks expand. It is not uncommon for enterprises to manage 15–25 functional security and network blocks, which can translate into 5–15 different platforms.

This complexity increases risk, drives up costs, and makes Zero Trust difficult, if not impossible, to execute effectively.

This reality has magnified the stakes for every organization.

Companies cannot function without their networks, but they can cease to exist after a major cybersecurity event.

As with most complex problems, the most effective solutions are rooted in fundamentals.

Zero Trust defines what you need. Standardization defines how to execute it. Investment in technology is necessary, but it's only effective when grounded in these two principles.

Your conversations with customers should shift from “How do we build Zero Trust?”

→

“Which SASE platform
best delivers the Zero Trust principles we need?”

The Importance of Fundamentals

Standardization

A Shift Toward Platform-Level Standardization

In 2025, single-vendor SASE adoption accelerated meaningfully, offering a path toward
platform-level standardization.

Leading platforms, such as Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma platform, continue to evolve by tightly integrating identity, device posture, network security, and AI-driven protection. This delivers Zero Trust principles by design: continuous verification, least-privilege access, and assume-breach thinking. Without requiring you to build and coordinate these controls across disconnected tools.

In the AI age, I believe the principle of standardization outweighs pure best-of-breed approaches by reducing risk, improving Zero Trust execution, and lowering overall cost.

Closing Reflection

In short, 2025 ushered in the AI age, making it more critical than ever to embrace the fundamentals of Zero Trust and standardization.

Globalgig’s mission is to help our partners and customers solve their most pressing security and networking problems.
We have embraced these fundamentals in our solution methodology, powered by Palo Alto Networks’ evolving Prisma platform.

I hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and I look forward to continuing the conversation in the new year.
I can’t wait to see how it evolves.

Yours,
Gregg Rowe