With the advent of IoT we are finding that we have an abundance of network susceptibilities, with too Little Time and Resources required for a successful transition and with so market competitiveness at stake if we fail to innovate and adapt.
A renowned research and development (R&D) firm forecasts that there will be in excess of 28 billion connected devices installed by the year 2020, while another R&D entity predicts that nearly 4.9 billion connected devices will be functioning in 2015, up 30% from the year 2014, and will reach the pinnacle of 25 billion by the year 2020.
One good instance of an industry which is transitioning to meet this opportunity is the retailing industry. You must have observed the revolution in your day to day shopping experience — whether it’s appropriate matching of merchandises to your individual profile and inclinations or in-store product or pricing evaluations using your mobile device.
But transitioning into the revolutionary digital retail environment powered by the Internet of Things will not happen without some major risks. New interconnectivity also raises the alarm of new security vulnerabilities. For the normal network administrator, a main security problem like the Heartbleed virus can rapidly transform itself into a severe case of heartburn for your organization. What is the nature of the susceptibility? Which devices will be affected? How should I react? If you associate these queries with the daily routine demands of directly provisioning end-users, replying to technical queries, fixing network problems, writing scripts, generating reports, screening and monitoring systems and administering version controls, it’s not shocking that a corporate network operations management team can be overcome. And this is before the increasing connectivity trend powered by the Internet of Things.
Rapidly identifying security threats among millions of interconnected network devices is extremely difficult, if not impossible using the old style technologies. But identifying pertinent security threats has conventionally been a time-wasting, manual procedure further complicated by the fact that even if an alert has been identified, a network administrator then has to identify the particular, affected devices on his company’s corporate network to safeguard them against risks. Now, multiply this issue with the blitzkrieg of IoT devices.
The Simple Answer: Automated Visibility Gives you Deeper, More Accurate Network Awareness for Enhanced Lifecycle Administration
For many companies these days, the answer to the problem of improved network protection is Cisco Smart Net Total Care. The SMARTnet service can spontaneously reach out over a network of tens of millions of Cisco devices and give you thorough information regarding each piece of hardware. This data can then be filtered by prevalent product security alerts to generate a customized Product Alerts Report for each impacted device sorted by hardware, software, field notices, IntelliShield, and PSIRTs. Cisco recently combined SMARTnet abilities with Cisco Smart Net Total Care. The enhanced Smart Net Total Care service gives you even more distinguished services to assist network support operation management teams identify troubled hardware devices and undertake preemptive steps to remedy real or possible issues. In this manner a network administrator can put away the Prilosec he has been taking regularly for his heartburn. Not only has he saved valuable time and more efficiently managed IT assets, more importantly he has assisted in the protection of his corporate network from interference. And the company is now ideally positioned with a process in place to scale their future security responses to the explosion of the IoT era.
The Significance of a “Force Multiplier”
Another great instance of how deeper network comprehension is assisting IT companies more effectively administer their networks is a Cisco customer who is one of the largest window manufacturers in the United States. They lacked the capability to easily identify end-of-life Cisco hardware and ensure vital support coverage. The organization’s leanly staffed IT team resorted to manually sifting through thousands of known security vulnerabilities to find which related to their hardware. This humongous effort wasted valuable time away from their more tactical network management projects.
Smart Net Total Care enables them to simplify their network administration operations by automating the detection of comprehensive network device information, understanding the information using off the shelf/custom reports viewable in an online web based portal, and then taking pre-emptive steps to dodge issues before they happen.
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