Cisco IoT sneak preview: what to watch for at digital Cisco Live June 16-17

The impact that IoT can have on an organization can be staggering. Yesterday, I talked to a manufacturing company that improved its production uptime by 13 percent – saving them millions, as a single day of shutdown results in $9 million of lost profits. Organizations across industries are executing on their digitization strategies to stay competitive and to maintain business continuity in these turbulent times. In fact, these successes will drive IoT devices to account for 50 percent of all network devices by 2023. At Cisco Live, taking place for free online June 16 and 17, you will hear how we are enabling new business-impacting IoT use cases and using the network to enable them. Let me give you a preview.

Innovative, business impacting use cases are everywhere

More than ever, we are seeing a wider variety of use cases requiring data to be used instantly and at mass. Examples of these include:

• Warehouses, distribution center and manufacturing facilities using automation to drive efficiency. Technologies such as autonomous guided vehicles can be used as material handling systems or load carriers traveling throughout the facility without an onboard driver.
• Surveillance and manufacturing use cases using 4K and 8K video to improve public safety and quality of production
• Managing crowds using 3D sensors or using thermal imaging to monitor employee health as they enter a building
• Communicating with high-speed trains to continuously monitor systems, location, track cargo, and provide onboard Wi-Fi to passengers

At Cisco live, we will cover these as well as other types of use case that can drive real results across your organization.

Is your network ready for IoT?

Many networks today were not designed for the capacity or speed required for some IoT use cases. Next-generation wireless technologies and their bandwidth heavy applications, for example, exceed the traditional capacity of wired infrastructure. The network must handle higher speeds and bandwidth both upstream and downstream or your users and their applications will not get the data needed to make business decisions in a timely fashion.

Another consideration is security. The number of connected devices drastically expands the threat surface, putting organizations at risk. Organizations need an accurate inventory of what assets are connected, a baseline of communication patterns for these assets, and anomaly detection for OT environments to secure any IoT deployment.

Finally, the number of connected devices far exceeds the growth of IT resources. Managing these devices and keeping the network up to date is overwhelming and expensive. And while next-generation wireless technologies are hailed as the answer for everything, that is simply not the case. Organizations will increase the types of access technologies they manage, because the best access technology depends on the use case. More than ever, IT needs a way to automate tasks, simplify the network and reduce the potential for rip and replace.

At Cisco Live, you will learn about how our new innovations will enable the network to better support real-time and bandwidth-heavy use cases with the simplicity you need. We will cover how Cisco, unlike any other vendor on the market, is helping secure networks throughout the enterprise all the way to OT, operational environment with Cisco Cyber Vision. Finally, you will hear more about our intent to acquire Fluidmesh enabling resilient wireless backhaul with zero packet loss – perfect for connecting anything moving at high speeds.

These and other topics will be discussed virtually. Please join us at Cisco Live.