IoT changing the network’s edge – Part 1

During a recent House of Lords debate, Martha Lane Fox claimed the UK has been “sleepwalking” through digital change and urged for more to be done to promote digital understanding. The pace of digital change is increasing. Enterprises need to adjust to keep up with rapidly changing technologies.

For many years, legacy network architecture was sufficient to meet business demands. Traditional networks essentially served as an internal resource to help operations run more efficiently, with assets, end users, and devices that were fixed in branch or store locations. These legacy networks existed and operated within four walls, and network responsibility ended at the switchport, says George Mulhern, CEO at Cradlepoint.

Driving change in the network

With digital transformation, these networks are being severely outgrown. Cloud, mobile and IoT are three of the macro trends fuelling this transformation, and the underlying enabler is pervasive connectivity. This is driving the need to transform the Wide Area Network (WAN) and giving rise to the ‘Connected Enterprise.’

A recent survey found that 97% of 1,000 IT decision makers agree that legacy network infrastructure will have difficulty keeping pace with the changing demands of the cloud and hybrid networks. As technology demands and mobile footprints grow, legacy systems no longer provide the flexibility, speed to deployment, and cost-effectiveness required for today’s Connected Enterprise.

Thus, the network itself is no longer solely an internal resource; it is both internal and external facing, and it is nonstop. Network and business needs have evolved, significantly changing enterprise network architecture. IT administrators simply cannot plan the way they used to, when legacy systems were meant for 200 branches with five people at each site. Today, the Connected Enterprise network extends far beyond its traditional boundaries.

Digital transformation and IoT

The use of connected devices has increased exponentially, with Gartner predicting that 8.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2017, and will reach 20.4 billion by 2020. Enterprise networks will need to manage thousands of new endpoints.

Software-defined Networking (SDN) has become the new way to manage and keep a corporate network secure. It represents the most significant change to enterprise networking since the introduction of the Internet. It is not a single technology, but an umbrella concept covering various applications.

There are many of these technologies addressing the different network infrastructures that span from the data centre to the WAN edge. In the same way there are a variety of approaches to extending this to branch, mobile, and IoT networks.

Transforming the WAN

SDN fundamentally changes not just how networks are built and managed, but how they evolve. New functionality can be developed on a quicker software-based development time frame versus a relatively long hardware development time frame, while also making it possible to programmatically control the network from a central location.

George Mulhern

The Software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) brings together cloud, mobility, scalability and agility. The network can be programmatically controlled from a central location and network services – such as end-to-end Virtual Cloud Networks and secure cloud gateways – can be abstracted from the underlying infrastructure.

The enterprise network has changed significantly and for businesses of all sizes and across many industries, digital transformation is no longer something on the distant horizon. Before the benefits of this transformation can be widely realised, IT teams will need to transform the complex, constrained, and costly legacy WAN.

A new generation of WAN infrastructure technologies has emerged — including cloud management and orchestration, SDN, and advanced LTE — that enables elastic and economical WANs that provide pervasive connectivity across the enterprise and beyond.

The author of this blog is George Mulhern, CEO at Cradlepoint

Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @IoTNow_OR @jcIoTnow

RECENT ARTICLES

OpenText Europe: AI for growth and sustainability

Posted on: March 19, 2024

OpenText, the information company, is set to host OpenText World Europe 2024 April 15 – 18, 2024, with a series of in-person customer conferences taking place in London, Munich and Paris. The event series will bring together industry leaders, innovators and customers to discuss how technology can enable global organisations to build for growth, experience and sustainability.

Read more

Surrey leads new £8 million FORT centre for advancing secure networks

Posted on: March 18, 2024

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) announced that Surrey’s 5G/6G Innovation Centre will lead a new £8 million Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Open Secure Networks (FORT). 

Read more
FEATURED IoT STORIES

What is IoT? A Beginner’s Guide

Posted on: April 5, 2023

What is IoT? IoT, or the Internet of Things, refers to the connection of everyday objects, or “things,” to the internet, allowing them to collect, transmit, and share data. This interconnected network of devices transforms previously “dumb” objects, such as toasters or security cameras, into smart devices that can interact with each other and their

Read more

The IoT Adoption Boom – Everything You Need to Know

Posted on: September 28, 2022

In an age when we seem to go through technology boom after technology boom, it’s hard to imagine one sticking out. However, IoT adoption, or the Internet of Things adoption, is leading the charge to dominate the next decade’s discussion around business IT. Below, we’ll discuss the current boom, what’s driving it, where it’s going,

Read more

9 IoT applications that will change everything

Posted on: September 1, 2021

Whether you are a future-minded CEO, tech-driven CEO or IT leader, you’ve come across the term IoT before. It’s often used alongside superlatives regarding how it will revolutionize the way you work, play, and live. But is it just another buzzword, or is it the as-promised technological holy grail? The truth is that Internet of

Read more

Which IoT Platform 2021? IoT Now Enterprise Buyers’ Guide

Posted on: August 30, 2021

There are several different parts in a complete IoT solution, all of which must work together to get the result needed, write IoT Now Enterprise Buyers’ Guide – Which IoT Platform 2021? authors Robin Duke-Woolley, the CEO and Bill Ingle, a senior analyst, at Beecham Research. Figure 1 shows these parts and, although not all

Read more

CAT-M1 vs NB-IoT – examining the real differences

Posted on: June 21, 2021

As industry players look to provide the next generation of IoT connectivity, two different standards have emerged under release 13 of 3GPP – CAT-M1 and NB-IoT.

Read more

IoT and home automation: What does the future hold?

Posted on: June 10, 2020

Once a dream, home automation using iot is slowly but steadily becoming a part of daily lives around the world. In fact, it is believed that the global market for smart home automation will reach $40 billion by 2020.

Read more

5 challenges still facing the Internet of Things

Posted on: June 3, 2020

The Internet of Things (IoT) has quickly become a huge part of how people live, communicate and do business. All around the world, web-enabled devices are turning our world into a more switched-on place to live.

Read more