The next wave of growth in enterprise business is already here- It’s called the Internet of things (IoT) and Audio Visual (AV)service platform is riding this growth. Most exciting IoT innovations are on the verge of happening in the enterprise sector and this will revolutionize the culture, mission, vision and core value of various industries.
With the Internet of Things (IoT), it suddenly became possible to connect millions of everyday enterprise AV equipment to the Internet, providing new product capabilities that this connectivity allows. When you introduce the IoT concept into an enterprise network although the fundamental idea of connectivity remains the same, complexity is added in layers to its architecture. There are hundreds of vendors in the market selling and thriving for innovation in their products/services but the million-dollar question is what are the best practices to adopt when introducing products and services that are changing the course of action in the enterprise world.
Here are the 4 best practices a corporate enterprise can assess before bringing in IoT devices into the enterprise infrastructure environment.
Iot Technology: From intelligent occupancy sensors to audio-video collaboration tools, from real-time digital signage to asset monitoring tracker, IoT is all about delivering an incredible user experience. As employee’s user experience becomes a strategic priority for employers, integrating tools that enhance and augments the audio-video collaboration becomes closer to achieving the goal. A basic IoT technology stack model comprises IoT hardware device , cloud interface, network connectivity secure protocols, an external information source gateway, identity access management and integration with internal business systems.
Assessing the IoT stack capabilities is one of the crucial responsibilities of business before even considering about mass roll outs. Gaining a holistic view of these devices in a real production environment will help engineers to build a solution catered to their environment.
Network Planning: Based on the IoT devices that you choose, one of the best practices for any enterprise organization will be to first conduct a network planning assessment. This mainly focuses on the discipline and postures that the devices must follow while onboarding to a corporate network. Some of the important considerations include:
-Whether or not the devices will sit on an isolated segmented network (micro-segmentation) or the same network as other endpoint devices?
-What is the default communication traffic for these devices? Most of the AV devices have 3 media traffic routes-Audio, Video and Screen sharing.
-Do you need additional firewall rules/policies in your network for accessing communication traffic?
-Is 802.1x authentication supported by the devices-If so, what will be the mechanisms involved in ensuring its achieved?
-What are the communication ports that the devices will be using over the internet?
-Are there additional functionalities such as multicasting, screencasting over a network infrastructure, If so what effect it will have over infrastructure Vs Direct?
-Network bandwidth analysis of all the communication traffic and a flow diagram for an end to end connectivity.
-Network latency/Jitter/traffic congestion assessment for media traffic.
-QoS implementation for both endpoints and network
Integration with Internal business systems:
Identifying business systems that are in the internal network will help to understand the functional capabilities that the devices can leverage upon. The backend legacy systems/cloud services, certificate authority, domain controller, proxy appliances, remote services, log monitoring tools, device management tools, Integration with SIEM, are all part of the internal business systems that have dependencies on the device functionality. Best approach in here would be to engage in with all the business stakeholders and create an end-end architecture design flow. Lets call this as the fundamental design framework of your technology.
Security and Privacy
In this era you should always have security first mindset. With the continuous cyberattacks happening around the globe, security is an integral part of technology. Unfortunately since the IoT industry is still an emerging field in a lot of markets, we are yet to see a lot of frameworks around adding proper security controls on these appliances. To a minimum, organizations must consider the following parameters when adding controls.
- What are the Physical/Logical/Admin controls specific to the appliances?
- How is the device going to be managed and what are the parameters that can be managed through various tools?
- TRA assessments need to be conducted on these devices before any deployment.
- Is there a proper integration of SIEM for log collection?
- Can we use inhouse monitoring services for these devices?
- What are the Network controls that need to be added on to these devices?
There is a need for every single organization to closely partner with the vendors in the industry to establish a client-specific framework. And vendors need to understand the importance of security, compliance, user experience when comes to entering into sectors like banking, healthcare etc. Future is bright for IOT enterprise and we will see a lot of changes happening in this field in future years.