For decades, enterprise networks were stitched together like a fragile patchwork. Companies purchased point solutions for every problem: SD-WAN for connectivity, firewalls for security, and a half-dozen other tools for the cloud. The result was a "bolt-on" architecture where security was an afterthought and teams were pitted against each other.

But that model is cracking. Today's data no longer resides within neat geographic boundaries. It flows across clouds, partner networks, and ravenous AI models, demanding protection that can travel with it. Now, the new imperative is "sovereignty by design," a radical shift where security and connectivity are co-engineered into a single, intelligent fabric.

Some of the calls to rethink this model are coming from one of its original architects. Vinay Prabhu, Vice President of Products at the network-as-a-service platform Graphiant, helped build the SD-WAN wave at firms like Viptela and Cisco. He says enterprises must adopt an entirely new mindset to secure their future.

• Assume breach: Start looking beyond areas that traditional tools cover, like data at rest and in processing, Prabhu advises. Instead, leaders can turn their attention to the most neglected and vulnerable state: data in motion. "Assume you've been breached. The immediate question is no longer if you're secure, but what is the blast radius? You must be able to instantly find out what was impacted and how far the damage extends."

The philosophy reframes everything from prevention to resilience. Before you can protect your data, you must be able to see it first, Prabhu explains. More than an asset, modern data is a sovereign entity. For him, that makes a foundation of visibility even more essential.

• The data embassy: Where compute power may not exist in the data's home jurisdiction, a "data embassy" can address the practical business need to move data across borders for functions like AI model training. "A country's sovereignty doesn't stop at its physical borders. It extends to its people through embassies abroad. Data is your most valuable asset, and it deserves the same level of protection. Its defenses must follow it wherever it goes."

The "data embassy" is a direct response to the escalating reality of global regulation, Prabhu says. Frameworks like the European Union's GDPR, Canada's Digital Charter, and India's data localization laws are proof that sovereignty obligations now follow data across the globe. This pressure is colliding with a technical explosion driven by AI, he continues. Here, the primary consumer of data is a distributed AI agent. To enforce sovereignty in this new reality, policy alone is not enough.

• Architecture as enforcement: Prabhu's approach also eliminates the risk of accidental breaches caused by human error, like a simple routing misconfiguration, that unintentionally sends sovereign data to a forbidden jurisdiction. "True enforcement isn't a firewall rule that says, 'You can't go there.' It's designing the network so that no information highway to a non-compliant region even exists. Even if a request is made, the network should make it impossible to get there because the path itself was never built."

The foundation of his vision is verifiable trust. In the old world, security was a promise, he says. But in the new world, it must be a provable reality.

• Assurance you can see: Verifiable tracking replaces the hollow guarantees offered by a fragmented collection of security products without a unified view of the data's journey. "You wouldn't put your family in a ride-sharing vehicle if the app just promised a safe journey. You trust it because you can track the car on a map in real time. An empty assurance has no weight. It's meaningless if you can't actually see it take place."

But how is this level of visibility achieved without creating new vulnerabilities? The key is unifying the network so telemetry can be streamed passively, without decrypting traffic as it crosses public domains. Here, the network provider remains "stateless," with no knowledge of the data itself, like a courier who knows the route but cannot open the package.

Ultimately, achieving this new standard of trust requires dissolving the artificial barriers between functions, Prabhu concludes. Infrastructure strategy and security strategy can no longer operate in separate silos. Instead, they must merge into a unified vision where the network is intelligent, observable, and secure by its very nature. "Connectivity, observability, and security. They all go hand in hand."