Business adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) is picking up and entering mainstream production environment. At last, industry is moving away from pilot projects and proofs-of-concept and are beginning to run their businesses on IoT, a recent studyshows that 69% of organizations are adopting or planning to adopt IoT. To have these IoT devices on board, organizations now expect more out of their campus network than moving data.
The Catalyst 9000 family has been designed from ground up to meet the needs of growing IoT devices. Long before 802.3bt became a standard, Catalyst 9000 family of switches provided Cisco Universal Power over Ethernet to power end points that require up to 60W of power. Enabling endpoints does not just stop by providing increased power, but by ensuring resilient, constant and immediate delivery of such power to these business-critical endpoints. The Catalyst 9000 family of switches deliver on that need through their industry leading innovations such as Perpetual PoE, Fast PoE and 2-event classification. Such innovation are not only limited to leading platforms, but are now available to all with Catalyst 9200, that can support full PoE+ on all ports and also deliver on the various PoE innovations.
With more and more IoT endpoints being onboarded to the network, security of these devices becomes quintessential to protect network against breaches. Using the power of UADP ASIC, Catalyst 9000 family of switches deliver security on hardware to ensure that security does not come with a compromise on network performance. Every Catalyst 9000 switch, including the recently introduced Catalyst 9200 supports MACsec, a technology that does link encryption between host-to-switch and switch-to-switch to secure the link by maintaining integrity and confidentiality of data being sent. We are taking this notion of securing network even further through Encrypted Traffic Analytics that helps detect encrypted malware without ever having the need to decrypt the packet for inspection.
Enabling such massive numbers of IoT endpoints increases an organizations’ attack footprint. To ensure such attack surface is contained, segmentation becomes key. Cisco, through industry-leading Software Defined Access architecture makes the job easy. SD-Access simplifies network segmentation and provides end-to-end automation capabilities along with consistent secure policy-based automation. Software defined access and network assurance capabilities together makes managing security violations and network malfunctions simple. With the advent of Catalyst 9200, now this architecture can become a reality for all sized organizations.
And with support for SD-Access Extension for IoT, organizations can now extend their policies to even wider deployments!
For the needs of organizations of all sizes as they try to bring in more and more IOT devices, Cisco has a solution for all. From small organizations or branch campus using Catalyst 9200 up to a large business critical enterprise using Catalyst 9300/9400, Catalyst 9000 family of switches deliver unparalleled infrastructure to enable a secure IoT experience.
