Secure the Industrial Edge with Cisco SD-WAN

The Expansion of Enterprise Networks

As networking infrastructure continues to expand in our hyper-connected world, the capabilities businesses have to deploy, secure, and manage their critical Internet of Things (IoT) devices plays an ever-increasing role in the success of their enterprise. In response to this expansion, there have been on-going innovations advancing the ways networks operate – and at the forefront of these trends is the way that SD-WAN enables and supports IoT deployments.

Networks are expanding outside traditional office buildings and into industrial spaces, resulting in more devices being connected to the internet and data centers. It is not just printers, light bulbs, and cameras anymore as IoT is moving far beyond the carpeted spaces – each day something new is added to your network and sometimes you may not even know it was there.

The rate of growth for IoT is moving so quickly that IDC estimates by 2025 there will be 55.7 billion IoT devices connected to the internet – that outnumbers the amount of humans in the world by a 7:1 ratio. Though the rise of IoT has improved and extended visibility to more operational elements of the business, it comes with a unique set of challenges that must be tackled to maintain the integrity of the network.

Challenges Surrounding IoT

Across multiple industries companies are finding it difficult to identify, manage, and secure industrial assets. The volume of IoT deployments in an enterprise can vary greatly and introduce incremental security risks. The bottom line is that to fully protect your network and enterprise, IoT devices must be secured on the same level as a data center or operating system would be.

Deployments in the field can be hard to manage with use cases like roadways and intersections, pipelines for oil and gas, and substation automation for power stations. The influx of IoT devices that are being added to networks can be a challenge for those in charge as observability becomes a bottleneck for networks operating on multiple WANs. These obstacles of observability and management can result in instances of unauthorized users accessing sensitive data and lead to high-risk vulnerabilities being exploited. In many cases, lack of consistent security policy extending through the industrial edge becomes an expensive problem.

Fortunately, Cisco SD-WAN provides users with the ability to manage, secure, and observe networks with IoT deployments of all sizes. Cisco SD-WAN provides seamless and secure connectivity far beyond your enterprise, powers automation to scale your operations, and enables visibility to keep your enterprise protected and resilient.

Cisco SD-WAN Can Help

Cisco SD-WAN provides solutions for common IoT challenges by converging security features and management tools that enable the visibility of IoT assets connected to the network while applying consistent security policies in both the enterprise as well as the industrial network extensions. With SD-WAN, encryption and segmentation of data from IoT devices can be applied so that the right people or applications with the right credentials see critical information at the right time.

Over the years, Cisco SD-WAN has made the world more connected than ever by enabling routers deployed in the field, on campus, and at home to be connected to a single network that can be managed with a single pane of glass. Now, Cisco SD-WAN allows for enterprise networks to be brought to the industrial edge to enable visibility and security needs without the need for an entirely new network or management tool.

The simplification of extending network security and routing policies to the edge of your network should be top of mind for any business looking to keep up with changing times and with Cisco SD-WAN, that power is yours.

Source: cisco.com