The Importance of Network Resilience in the IoT

What Does the Growth of IoT Mean for IT Infrastructure?

The Internet of Things, it is a big movement but it is a movement that is happening and will happen for maybe 20 years. It is a big shift to devices that are around us and are network enabled and they can communicate among themselves, collect data, transmit data, exchange data and collect a lot more information for our systems to affect the way we live. So the Internet of Things, it is a big thing, and I think there is a lot of hype, so a lot of people got too excited about IoT too early and now there is disappointment because IoT didn’t happen as fast but IoT is certainly a very important movement.

Moving Complexity from the Edge to the Center…then Back Again

The trend in IT infrastructure management in the past few years has been the centralization of complexity from the edge of the network to the core, to the cloud data center. What you’re going to see in the next few years is the reversal of that trend, where complexity migrates back to the edge of the network. And that’s motivated by the increase in adoption of IoT technologies, the increased adoption of video content and rich media content and modern new technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality that’s going to increase the volume of data and will require more IT infrastructure close to the end users.

Remote Provisioning and Automation of IT Infrastructure

As the complexity migrates back to the edge of the network, I think there is a re-energizing of the need for remote management technologies, out-of-band technologies, as well as remote provisioning and the automation of the remote management of network infrastructure. As the complexity moves back to the edge, the connection between the core and the edge becomes very important. So not only do you need to be able to monitor and manage the equipment at the edge of the network, you need to make sure there is resilience in the connection between the internet, or your core network, and the edge infrastructure.  So technologies like out-of-band management are going to become very important, not only for managing and monitoring, but also to guarantee the resilience of the connection between the two sites.