As work becomes more distributed, the internet of things (IoT) is going to play an increasingly crucial role in bridging the digital and physical worlds. The pandemic paved the way for new internet of things (IoT) devices to remotely monitor and resolve issues in real time. With 55.9 billion IoT devices expected to enter the field by 2025, an increasing number of attacks put IoT devices under major threat if they continue to function on legacy software and systems—one of the riskiest landmines for any organization.
In fact, 64 percent of organizations globally use IoT solutions, and 43 percent don’t protect their full IoT suite completely. Because of this, organizations today need to up the ante with a modern, scalable, AI-powered network solutions that can configure and monitor the health of their IoT infrastructure to mitigate these risks and maintain employee productivity.
Today, many large and small enterprises still rely on outdated legacy systems and software to run their business, despite the urgent need to modernize and digitalize their processes and workflows. Yet, managing and maintaining legacy systems isn’t exactly cheap—for example, McKinsey estimates that 70 percent of banks’ IT budgets are spent on maintaining legacy systems. Generally, banks still use mainframe technologies that are complex and functionally siloed in today’s standard. And, an enterprise-wide transformation aimed at keeping up with modern technology, such as cloud-native workflows and cybersecurity solutions, may necessitate pricey transitions.
How legacy technologies can cause more harm than good
Legacy systems offer a sense of familiarity and comfort, but outdated applications pose higher security risks in today’s evolving threat landscape. With IoT spending in the Asia Pacific expected to reach US$436 billion by 2026, businesses will have to be better equipped with next-generation technologies to combat modern threats, because IoT devices can be an entry point for attackers looking to move laterally across an IT network and gain access to more sensitive data.
Most companies’ existing networks use basic discovery and profiling techniques to recognize a fairly narrow set of devices, such as identifying a smartphone running on an Android operating system. However, with many loT devices built with generic hardware and software, legacy technology lacks modern network visibility and risks inaccurate access control to unauthorized devices.
Visibility without proper control can leave organizations susceptible to security and compliance risks. When paired with Aruba Central Client Insights, Aruba ClearPass Policy Manager helps identify users and devices on the network using granular role-based policies that work to authenticate, authorize and continuously monitor for rogue IoT devices. Through behavior-based profiling using artificial intelligence (AI)- or machine learning (ML)-based classification, Aruba gives administrators greater visibility across the entire network, while providing a Zero Trust and SASE framework designed to tackle these problems.
Minimizing human error and failed networks
Network management is a highly manual profession and is considerably susceptible to user error—the chief cause of unplanned downtime. Nearly 40 percent of organizations have suffered a major outage caused by human error over the past three years, and 85 percent of these incidents stemmed from failure to follow procedures or network-related lapses.
Many enterprises are also struggling to overcome a talent gap in data science, which affects their ability to adopt AI to intelligently automate network monitoring and analyze issues detected in the system. Without modern network protocols and designs, network teams are stretched thin because manually applying and enforcing network access control (NAC) policies across a distributed, global network is labor-intensive and can leave security gaps.
Location- or network-specific constructs such as IP addresses or subnets are traditionally used to define security policies, which can lead to complexity and IT teams losing the opportunity for automation. For example, Aruba Central NetConductor enables users to automate workflows in their existing networks to securely deploy and configure operations. Role-based policies defined in Aruba Central are pushed to the infrastructure edge devices and enhance security from internal threats within the network that would have otherwise gone undetected by traditional perimeter firewalls.
Aruba AIOps that is built into Aruba Central also eliminates manual troubleshooting tasks with direct IT support access through the Aruba Technical Assistance Center (TAC) to cut down on time-consuming analysis, root cause determination and remediation.
How companies can cater to the demand for data access and usage
Leading high-end electronics supplier, KEMET, sought to overcome their legacy systems with a network infrastructure capable of supplying secure, high-performance voice, video and IoT connectivity to power Industry 4.0 on production floors. This upgrade was critical to mobilizing its workforce in 45 manufacturing and sales facilities across 22 countries.
KEMET’s aging technology infrastructure had become a bottleneck in regulating user access. For example, higher traffic during the FIFA World Cup season overloaded their Wi-Fi and impacted manual user authentication, stagnating the business as frustrated team members waited up to two hours for a faraway engineer to grant access them access.
After using Aruba Central’s AI-based predictive analytics and deep insights, the organization had continuous visibility into how the network is performing to detect and streamline secure connectivity for customers, contractors, visitors, and employee bring your own device (BYOD). What would’ve traditionally taken weeks to process, KEMET can now accomplish in less than two business days, with two people to configure and package 100 access points.
With the Aruba ecosystem, our AI-based predictive analytics and deep insights extensively optimized KEMET’s network to supply streamlined and secure connectivity for KEMET’s customers, contractors, visitors and employee BYOD.
If there’s one thing the pandemic has taught us, it’s being adaptable in times of unpredictability. By ensuring that they are flexible and scalable, businesses can reset and reshape their strategies to drive growth. However, revitalizing legacy assets with more robust functionality is paramount to business success in navigating the increasing threat surface area that exist today.
With our AI-powered centralized cloud-native platform, enterprises can enable their people to collaborate on virtually any device, and better equip themselves to modernize their wired and wireless infrastructure to facilitate the adoption of IoT and enhance workforce productivity—all without the headache of not knowing whether their displaced perimeter-based network defense is up to scratch in preventing data and security breaches. If you want to find out more, connect with me or my team.
You can also find out more about Aruba Central here.
