Cisco Scores Highest in Gartner 2018 Critical Capabilities for Meeting Solutions
The networking field is changing fast. This year, several emerging technologies will fundamentally impact how businesses and their employees connect. The good news is that each technology also represents a solid opportunity to improve some aspect of how a company runs – from network efficiency all the way up to business models.
• Wi-Fi 6: also called 802.11ax, is an upgrade on the current highest-speed Wi-Fi protocol in wide use, 802.11ac. Wi-Fi 6 brings a dramatic improvement in efficiency across all existing Wi-Fi bands, including older 2.4GHz frequencies. Wi-Fi 6 will also likely get new spectrum in the 6GHz band in 2019 or 2020, further improving its speed.
• 5G: Consumers will be itching to get onboard with 5G in 2019, as carriers roll out limited installations that work on a small number of devices. Beyond 2019, 5G will bring improved speed and battery life to smartphones, as well as the growth of fixed wireless for residences, competing with wired broadband for some communities.
• Digitized Spaces: New high-resolution geolocation technologies based on wireless radios in mobile devices, plus data mining software, are creating opportunities to understand how people and things move through physical spaces. Companies that adopt these technologies will get access to information about the users of their buildings that will open up new possibilities for business extensions and improvements.
• SD-WAN: Businesses are moving to software-defined wide-area networking, SD-WAN.. SD-WAN allows networks to route traffic based on centrally-managed roles and rules, no matter what the entry and exit points of the traffic is – and with full security.
• Machine Learning: In 2019, companies will start to adopt Artificial Intelligence, in particular, Machine Learning, to analyze the telemetry coming off networks to see these patterns, in an attempt to get ahead of issues from performance optimization, to financial efficiency, to security.
2019 is going to be a transformative year in enterprise networking. Network operators will be preparing systems to support dramatically greater device density and data throughput, and they will be getting new analytics about their infrastructure use from the network itself. Meanwhile, network personnel will become more effective and efficient, thanks to improvements in centralized management tools and machine intelligence.
Together, these new capabilities will make networks into even more important assets that businesses will leverage in ways that we have not yet begun to realize.
Source: blogs.cisco.com
