Enterprises across the board have been focusing on expanding and deepening their digital transformation. Kurt Schaubach, CTO, Federated Wireless, discusses the need to move to private 5G to truly leverage the innovations of the new cloud, the edge and the IoT.
If you follow the enterprise technology space, you may have noticed signs of a sea change. As an industry, we’ve been talking about digital transformation for years, but usually in future-focused terms. Suddenly, the pictures painted by vendors and the technology press seem much more concrete. You can thank three converging technology trends: cloud, edge, and Internet of Things (IoT).Â
With new edge and IoT solutions, forward-looking businesses are connecting and automating operations across factories, farms, and hospitals. They’re running computationally intensive workloads like advanced analytics and machine learning locally and immediately acting on those insights. Just as important, those investing in early edge and IoT initiatives are planting a stake in the ground to transform their business—maybe their whole industry—before the competition beats them to it.
Enterprises in every sector have been tracking this change, and many are now evaluating edge and IoT investments to fuel their own digital transformation. As they do, though, some overlook a crucial part of the story: connectivity. Existing infrastructure (typically, legacy Wi-Fi) can’t provide the necessary performance, security, or control for the genuinely transformative edge and IoT innovations. The early lesson: if you’re investing in digital transformation, upgrading connectivity should be part of that cycle.Â
The good news is, just as businesses rethink enterprise operations, a complementary revolution is reimagining enterprise connectivity with Private 5G. Those adopting private wireless find it provides an ideal platform for their digital transformation initiatives—and an early competitive edge.Â
Why can’t businesses get the most from digital transformation with legacy infrastructures? Because those infrastructures can’t deliver many of the capabilities – higher performance, lower latency, stronger security – that more innovative applications require.Â
Legacy Wi-Fi, with its inconsistent bandwidth and latency as well as its lack of good options to connect to and secure autonomous equipment, isn’t a viable option here. The manufacturer could buy connectivity from a wireless carrier, but that brings its own issues: higher costs, lack of true privacy, and overall lack of control over the infrastructure.
Now though, there’s an alternative to meet demanding application requirements without Wi-Fi or telco connectivity deficits: Private 5G. This manufacturer could connect factories end to end with the right performance and security using private wireless. They could retain total control of their connectivity and keep all sensitive data on-premises. And they could put in place a cloud-native business infrastructure by design, making it much easier to add new edge and IoT capabilities in the future.
