Off-grid: networks cut the cord
Faster, more robust wireless connections offer alternatives to the LAN and public hotspots. But how do IT leaders navigate their way through 5G, 6G, and satellite technology?
Businesses of all sizes depend on a mix of technologies to access and move data.
Wired networks provide the critical data backbones and connections to data centers.
But more and more enterprise data is carried by alternative networks. Some traffic never even touches the conventional, corporate LAN but goes directly from a mobile user, an IoT device, or a branch office to a cloud provider or a SaaS application.
Cellular connections through 4G and now 5G routers, and satellite links are already common as backups to fixed lines, for events and emergencies, for hard-to-reach locations, and even for large sites, including warehouses, sports venues and transport hubs.
But alternative, wide-area network technology is gaining ground for routine use, rather than just edge or temporary use cases.
Businesses want to make more use of data-rich applications, from video and voice to AI, with high-speed, high-quality connections across their operations.
Then there is the growing interest in operational resilience. A single network connection is a bottleneck and a potential single point of failure.
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Increasingly, this means looking at more than one network. And technologies previously viewed as only suitable for edge cases are now moving to the core of the enterprise network.
“The traffic patterns are becoming very bursty, asymmetric, and highly latency sensitive,” Hardik Ajmera, a vice president at Extreme Networks, told ITPro. It no longer makes sense, he says, to route all network traffic through the corporate office or data center.
But how do enterprises manage the inevitable complexity this brings?
