Exclusive: VyOS Networks on why enterprise networks need a unified OS layer

Enterprise networks have undergone a quiet but significant transformation.

What once revolved around a central office and a hardened perimeter has, over the last decade, been replaced by sprawling, highly distributed architectures driven by cloud adoption, remote work and the rapid emergence of AI-driven workloads.

Taras Pudiak, Vice President of Business and Technology Integrations at VyOS Networks, says critical systems no longer sit behind a single perimeter, and the public internet has become "kind of the backbone of the enterprise network."

The modern enterprise now routes traffic between homes, branch offices, edge locations and multiple clouds. Security follows the user through VPNs and zero-trust policies rather than a physical gateway. The effect, Pudiak says, is that networks must behave consistently across environments that were never designed to look alike.

VyOS positions itself as a unifying platform in this landscape. Not a cloud service and not a traditional hardware-centric network appliance, but an open-source network operating system that runs consistently across clouds, hypervisors, and bare metal, with the same feature set and user experience wherever it is deployed.

According to Pudiak, cloud networking is often a completely different thing, where engineers must forget everything that they know about networking before learning platform-specific constructs and constraints. By providing a consistent operating system, VyOS aims to eliminate that learning curve and make cross-environment networking manageable using familiar tooling.

"We are the glue that actually connect all these dots together," he says. 

AI expectations for capacity and control

The explosion of high-volume AI workloads is putting additional pressure on enterprise networks. Training and analytics pipelines now move enormous data sets between compute clusters, storage systems and specialised cloud inference platforms.

"These workloads simply need to move more data; loading or updating an AI model can easily involve hundreds of gigabytes, and training and analytics pipelines regularly shuffle large datasets between storage, compute clusters, and specialised external AI services in the network," says Pudiak. "If the network cannot keep up, these jobs become slow and unpredictable. Organisations increasingly expect reliable, high-speed connectivity to the places where the network loads run."

Performance alone is not enough. AI traffic is often seen in bursts: massive one moment, quiet the next. That dynamic is driving demand for networks that can be controlled by software, where capacity can be provisioned automatically for a job and released once it ends.

For VyOS, that translates into accelerating encrypted throughput, improving performance and making configuration more automation-friendly so networks can be treated like any other programmable resource.

Multi-gigabit, encrypted and automated

Enterprise expectations for performance are rising fast. Ten-gigabit links at branch locations are becoming more common, and interconnections between data centres, clouds and exchange points are scaling into tens or hundreds of gigabits.

"From the user's perspective, it should not matter whether they are in a branch office or at home, they expect similar level of performance everywhere," says Pudiak.

Organisations increasingly want to steer traffic intelligently, avoid over-provisioning and integrate their network into automation pipelines.

"It's not only toward more bandwidth," he says. "It's also toward high-performance links that are programmable and integrated into the overall automation story."

What CIOs Should Prioritise

As organisations expand cloud adoption and enable remote work at scale, Pudiak highlights three priorities.

CIOs should aim for networking models that behave the same across data centres, clouds and edge sites. Consistency reduces operational friction and simplifies enforcing policy. This way, organisations can build repeatable solutions for multiple clients using the same software foundation.

He added that, with remote work and cloud-based workload distribution, the network must integrate cleanly with identity, logging, automation, and security tooling. Without that, enterprises lose visibility and control over how traffic flows.

Perhaps the most critical factor, Pudiak says, is avoiding architectures that "tie you too tightly to a single provider." Costs, technologies and requirements shift quickly. Organisations need programmable, software-defined approaches that allow them to adapt without redesigning from scratch.

Finally, he says that networks should be treated not as fixed infrastructure but as an evolving software system. For VyOS, that means continually expanding performance, scalability and features so the platform remains viable for years.