hen Rami Rahim landed his first engineering gig in 1998, and joined a tiny networking start-up in Silicon Valley called Juniper Networks, he chose a company with big ambitions and superb timing. Juniper set out to re-imagine network technology and the mass-scaling of connectivity, and did so right at the ideal moment, at the dawn of the Internet era. Rahim, as it turned out, stuck around for the whole ride at Juniper, quite literally helping engineer the company’s rise over nearly 20 years.

Now as the CEO of the $5 billion tech giant since 2014, Rahim is focusing on another massive scaling challenge. Connectivity today is as omnipresent as the wind; the problem is that exponential growth in connectivity has created a monumental task—to secure it all operationally, and keep it out of the hands of bad guys. That’s why Rahim sees cybersecurity as not just a primary company focus, but as a mission of personal responsibility: Given that Juniper helped enable all this mass connectivity and the IoT, Rahim now wants to solve some of the problems his technology inadvertently helped create. “Secure networks are a critical element in helping companies innovate faster, and with boldness,” he says. “I see this as one of our core responsibilities.”

For most companies, Rahim explains, balancing the need for rapid-fire, DevOps-paced product innovation with comprehensive network security is a tricky undertaking in the age of the cloud and IoT. Most enterprise organizations today, he argues, do no better than tread water. “Most of the IT in a typical enterprise today goes toward simply maintaining status quo.”

Why? A few reasons. First, technology companies are facing challenges on multiple fronts. As Rahim says, Moore’s Law is no longer a relevant benchmark for CPU-based innovation; we’re entering a new era of GPU-driven advancement for computing, but for many companies it’s still uncharted territory. Second is the issue of trust: in the cloud era, brands have to establish trust outside their immediate control, between customers and applications, not necessarily between users and themselves.

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But the biggest reason is IoT and the complexity it presents the enterprise, especially when it comes to security. Businesses today operate in extremely complex and connected environments—powered by IoT, cloud networking, SaaS, and mobile technologies. A company’s “attack surface” is no longer a linear concept, such as a scannable network. It’s more like an elastic, living organism, and is likely only partly visible, even with the most advanced tools. Some assets on corporate networks aren’t visible. Others, like public cloud infrastructure and SaaS applications, don’t operate on a company’s network at all. It’s a challenge, Rahim argues, that is ultimately beyond human capability. “No human,” he says, “can keep up with the pace of software changes today.”

There’s one obvious reason why: There simply aren’t enough humans to help. One of the shallowest talent pools in the labor market today is cybersecurity. In the U.S., over 40,000 cyber-related positions routinely go unfilled every year. According to one recent industry forecast from ISACA, within two years the tech industry will be dealing with a global shortage of 2 million cyber professionals; and even of those getting hired today, less than half are considered fully qualified. Connectivity has scaled too rapidly for the labor marketplace to keep up.

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So how, then, to meet the big challenge? While STEM education, training and hiring all need to ramp up to address the talent shortage in cyber, Rahim believes it will fall to deep learning applications and the emerging promise of AI to close the biggest gaps. And cybersecurity, he adds, “is set up like no other vertical I can think of when it comes to being ready for AI and what it can accomplish.”

While Rahim is bullish on AI and deep learning not just in the cyber world but across a range of industries, he also places a lot of trust in the human side of the equation, something he is focused on putting into practice at Juniper. Most of the recent large-scale data breaches and hacks—Equifax, Home Depot, Target, and many others—have come from basic human errors and oversights, often including the lack of basic, no-brainer-type policies that could prevent these suicidal corporate disasters.

“There are simple rules we can teach our employees,” says Rahim, “like not allowing IoT devices to communicate with your networks.” But it’s employee learning, not deep learning, that gets those policies in place, and which AI-enabled applications can then help enforce, without fail. “That’s why I am a big believer in employee education and culture, and creating an environment where everyone is encouraged to ask questions and challenge the status quo.”

To learn about secure network solutions built for your business, visit Juniper Networks.

This article was written by WIRED Brand Lab in partnership with Juniper.