The future of enterprise networking with 5G taking center stage

5G brings the promise of the proliferation of IoT and M2M for the industrialized enterprise

Enterprises are eagerly anticipating the move to adopting 5G. They are looking to unlock its power in advanced connectivity, low-latency retransmissions, increased bandwidth, application, and content scaling for live and real-time content to address emerging technologies. The benefits will scale enterprises’ network transport and transform their digital transformation journey according to Deloitte’s study of enterprises building their future with 5G and Wi-Fi 6.

It is telling that networking executives don’t view 5G and Wi-Fi 6 as incremental improvements to previous generations of wireless, but as a significant opportunity to transform how their enterprises operate, as well as the products and services they offer. Remarkably, 86% of networking executives surveyed believe that advanced wireless will transform their organization within three years, and 79% say the same about their industry.

Deloitte

5G brings massive scaling of endpoints, but most importantly… of DATA

Communications Service Providers (CSPs) will of course offer 5G services targeting their Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and enterprise customers. They are busy enabling enterprise platforms with cloud tools while also competing with the cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), and Google (Cloud). With advanced 5G connectivity, CSPs will gain greater flexibility in delivering diverse services enterprises require. As enterprises have shifted to digitalization (more rapidly than perhaps expected with COVID-19 and WFH), their network services are needing to scale at unprecedented levels. 

Targeted services for 5G in the enterprise 

The benefits are fairly clear for 5G enterprise use cases. Still, it does not mean that it will be smooth sailing after completing a 5G deployment as 5G access only addresses the last mile of connectivity for the remote worker and fixed-wireless 5G access for the branch, for instance. 

It’s well known that the core of the internet is not designed to handle next-generation apps and real-time interactivity. When transitioning to 5G connectivity, enterprises need to ensure their CSPs have updated their edge-access, mid-haul, and back-haul network segments to handle their use cases’ requirements. Let’s take a look at some of the requirements:

• Multi-access/multi-site/multi-cloud network services
• Latency-critical, real-time, highly-reliable services
• Data distribution at scale: group communication, content distribution

Moving the data closer to the user has always been the primary goal for organizations who want to create and maintain exceptional user experiences. Enterprise 5G access can provide unprecedented flexibility. Here are some of the technologies that 5G will more fully enable:

• SD-WAN
• Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC)
• Better user experience for low latency applications like video streaming, AR, VR
• Realtime decision making for applications like connected car, autonomous vehicles, industrial automation and Industry 4.0, and public safety
• Flexible security for protecting the enterprise environment and to provide security or complement security for the end devices from the edge

But, there remains many security challenges with 5G 

5G brings the promise of the proliferation of IoT and M2M for the industrialized enterprise. However, there remains several security challenges that cannot be ignored: 

1. IoT and M2M: Inherently have weaker security built into IoT devices, are more susceptible to peer-to-peer attacks, V2X use cases
2. Virtualization: Increased complexity in mitigating side-channel attacks and securing cloud-native architectures
3. Distributed Architectures: Multiple “Gi” type interfaces, API based interfaces to IoT, and cloud-deployed applications
4. New and Legacy Technologies: Improper isolation between technologies will prevent threat migration between technologies

Enterprises are excited not just about the IoT, next-gen applications, and the digital experiences 5G can offer. Businesses can be transformed when leveraging applications and software development to the cloud and implementing IoT and edge use cases enabled by 5G. Business applications must perform at scale with consistent security and speed or risk hurting brand and customer loyalty.

When choosing a performance assurance solution suitable for the agile nature of software-defined architectures running at the speed of 5G, you will want to ensure to measure baseline performance before, during, and after 5G deployment to provide a superb user experience. The Skylight performance analytics platform provides the shortest time-to-insight utilizing highly granular metadata, with unsurpassed performance visibility, data granularity, and the ability to detect real-time performance issues. 

Don’t wait! Book a demo to see Skylight in action now!