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Are you looking to be a jack of all trades with your Utility network? Look no further! With the new Cisco SD-WAN capabilities that combine IoT features with enterprise networks it is now easier than ever to extend your carpeted space to the outdoors and rugged indoor environments, and make it one large, cohesive, and easy to manage network! IoT Utility customers are beginning to realize the value of managing the WAN network using a decentralized controller-based model. The advantages of this model are many-fold. Cisco SD-WAN excels in connecting enterprise devices (routers and platforms) securely to apply an “application first” paradigm to policy and control plane management, i.e., devices can only communicate with destinations consistent with their role and security posture.

With the new features in Cisco SDWAN version 20.7 we can now extend the concept of the extended enterprise based on the SDWAN network to IoT Utility AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) networks. What are IoT AMI networks you may ask? These are mesh networks of millions of connected, IPv6 enabled smart metering and monitoring equipment. These new smart meters are enabling insights into the electric grid and providing a proactive approach to managing the electric grid, including providing early outage alerts and data related to the network management of these meters. Our SD-WAN customers would also like to extend all the upsides of an SDWAN managed head-end to the IoT-AMI network for a one-two punch combo!

These networks thus far have been managed by a single management platform – the Cisco IoT Field Network Director (FND). With SDWAN thrown into the mix for customers already using the Cisco SDWAN platform we are now able to construct a hybrid model with the AMI network managed by FND and the Head-End network managed by the Controller in Cisco SDWAN – vManage. To learn more, read the whitepaper providing details of the solution as a starting and strategy guide for deploying and extending your enterprise network to Rugged and non-carpeted spaces by leveraging industrial IoT routing.



Authors

Nipun Jain

Technical Marketing Engineer

IoT