Smart from Core to Edge: Next Gen Networking for the Digital Enterprise

As countries and enterprises continue to roll out Smart City and IoT initiatives, demand for more and better connections will increase, as will impact on network infrastructure. Leading hubs of IoT development have sprouted across North America, impacting industries such as transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, government, healthcare, and retail. This article illustrates how these trends will hasten convergence of broadband fibre, copper and wireless as well as powered connectivity.

In the digitally transforming economies of North America, enterprises have to be mindful that deploying individual networks for the myriad of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud services not only adds both complexity and cost but also may end up impacting network performance and even precious real estate. This chapter provides ideas on a structured cabling approach that ensures scalability and simplicity across diverse deployments.

Faced with surging demand for cloud-based services and data storage, fuelled by the rapid pace of digitisation, rising affluence and an increasingly tech-savvy young population, big corporations are expanding their cloud infrastructure footprint. We recommend proven option to boost business agility without intensive CapEx.

User experience is crucial in today’s digital, hyper-connected environment. The productivity loss that wireless connectivity downtime and bottlenecks create, hinder organisations from accelerating digital innovations and transforming themselves. Wi-Fi 6 a game-changer for today's pandemic-riven businesses.

Communications networks are more complex than ever before. High bandwidth, media-rich applications, the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) culture and the Internet of Things (IoT) have hastened businesses toward 802.11ac Wave 2 Wi-Fi implementations, even as 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) begins to gain awareness. We explain the critical importance of multi-gigabit connectivity between Wi-Fi 6 access points and Ethernet switches at the edge.

Healthcare, transport and logistics, manufacturing, smart venues, smart cities, and oil and gas sectors will be major spenders in private Long-Term Evolution (LTE) from 2020 to 2025, according to ABI Research. Main drivers of private LTE are a new understanding of spectrum usage spearheaded by Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) activities.

Enterprises are developing intuitive self-service workflows with streamlined network onboarding so bring-your-own-device (BYOD) users, guests and IT-issued devices can gain network access simply and securely without IT intervention. This chapter recommends simple ways to secure network on-boarding and cloud-managed Wi-Fi.

In today’s hyper-connected smart buildings, every network connection is a path into a corporate or mission-critical network. At the same time, the size of the attack surface when it comes to insider threats varies directly with the number of people who have access to the data being protected. This chapter highlights the need for secure on-boarding, authentication and physical-layer security.