Industrial IoT takes center stage at Cisco Live EMEA

Cisco Live EMEA wrapped up last week. And while the event is over, the momentum continues to build.

Conversations in Amsterdam affirmed that industrial organizations have set their sights on increasing productivity and sustainability. They want to revolutionize how they connect, manage, and secure their operations – and they realize that technology is essential to that goal.

They’re investing in building networks in new places: roadways and bridges, wind and solar farms, utility grids and manufacturing lines. These sites are often remote with harsh environmental conditions. And industrial locations can number in the hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands – and be spread across regions or entire countries.

Now consider what it takes to manage a traditional IT network: deploying and configuring hardware and software. Monitoring network infrastructure and connected devices. Keeping it all up, running, and secure. Given the realities of industrial networks, those are daunting requirements even for IT networking veterans. For most industrial operations teams, however, they represent entirely new – and highly complex – responsibilities. They’re looking for help as they strive to realize the full potential of digitization.

Technologies are driving sustainability

During the opening keynote, Vincenzo Ranieri, CEO of ENEL Distribution, explained how this world leading energy distribution company moved to a cloud operating model to connect and manage millions of renewable electricity production resources and reshape the power distribution value chain. Cisco has been a key partner in the past decade to help ENEL reinvent their network infrastructure, converge IT and OT to actively manage resources and enable a resilient smart grid at the scale required for such a massive transformation to a more sustainable energy production model.

During the industrial IoT iTalk keynote, Chris McGookin, Lead Cyber and Telecoms Engineer at ScottishPower Renewables, explained the complexity of the industrial environment he’s responsible for. Operating windfarms in the middle of the ocean is probably one of the most challenging networking tasks. It requires a variety of fixed and wireless network technologies, connecting critical remote systems, and involving teams that need to be able to integrate these seamlessly so they can focus on the job at hand. Cisco is providing ScottishPower Renewables a comprehensive, hardened, and secure technology stack to enable simple deployment of complex industrial networks that can be remotely managed and easily duplicated to new sites.

Simplifying IT for OT

At Cisco Live EMEA, our conversations focused on offering users a wide choice of networking technologies to enable their specific industrial use cases, and making deployment, management, operations, and security simple so anyone could be all in. On the show floor, the Industrial IoT booth was packed all day, every day, with customers and partners eager to learn about our new and recently updated industrial networking portfolio and our new solutions for simplifying IT by using cloud operating models.

The announcements included significant enhancements to Cisco IoT Operations Dashboard, that provides cloud-delivered OT services for industrial networks empowering operations teams to remotely manage their industrial IoT securely, flexibly, and at scale. We’ve enhanced it with Cisco Cyber Vision to provide detailed visibility into connected assets and automatic identification of vulnerabilities. We’ve taken its Secure Equipment Access service to new heights so experts can gain remote access to more types of OT devices and security teams can better control who has access to what and when.

We also announced Cisco Catalyst IE3100 Rugged Series Switches, bringing the power, manageability, and security of Cisco’s Catalyst switches to places where space is an issue such as industrial machines or roadside/trackside cabinets. We unveiled our new Catalyst IW9165E Rugged Wireless Client, purpose-built for connecting mobile industrial assets like autonomous robots, and the new Catalyst IW9165D Heavy Duty Access Point, which makes it super easy to deploy resilient, low-latency wireless backhaul anywhere fiber or cellular isn’t an option.

A week of technical learning… available on demand!

Cisco Live Is a unique opportunity to engage with our solutions architects, product managers, and engineers. If you couldn’t make it to Amsterdam this year, you can still hear more about these innovations and learn from many advanced technical topics with these session replays:

Have a look at the full catalog of technical sessions related to industrial use cases by browsing this list.

Most importantly, don’t miss the opportunity to learn more during our upcoming customer webinar on February 28. Register now to secure your place. Then mark your calendar for June 4-8, 2023, for Cisco Live in Las Vegas – where we’ll be sharing even more industrial technology innovations that increase sustainability and transform critical industries.

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