Insights on the ICT sector by Robin Duke-Woolley, CEO of Beecham Research .
The ICT sector in the highly accessible and interactive IoT World Map includes an ever-widening range of network and data infrastructure that together provide the ‘engine’ for not only the IoT sector, but the IT sector as well and everything in the Digital World.
Much of this is classed as critical infrastructure, where uptime performance of as close to 100% operation as possible is hugely important. From a mobile network perspective, that includes monitoring individual cell towers and network elements and for data centres it includes monitoring of individual servers, even down to individual server blades. The aim is to predict potential failure so action can be taken before it happens.
Large public IoT and IT environments have hundreds of thousands of network devices and systems across multiple locations and there is a need to provide an easy way to gain visibility and control of these increasingly complex infrastructures. Network Intelligence is an example of this – using the power of Artificial Intelligence to rapidly process the streams of data coming from network devices to quickly establish potential sources of failure. It also increasingly provides a means of automatically remedying those situations without the need for human intervention.
IoT has a huge part to play in this area and this will increase further as new technologies like 5G are introduced. Added to this is the growing interest in private networks and the monitoring of infrastructure elements within those. Enterprises are moving to private networks in order to streamline and raise productivity in their operational sites, dramatically increasing the use of real time applications in order to move to local control and automation. The ICT sector has a large part to play in the success of these developments.
We all use these network infrastructures and assume they will be there for us and for our connected devices. IoT in the ICT sector helps to make that a reality
