Cisco casts an eye over IoT protocol landscape: Everything the light touches is ours • The Register
There are good reasons to try and automate the network behaviour of IoT devices: as Cisco’s enterprise networking marketing vice president Prashan Shenoy told The Register’s networking desk, the ratio of IT personnel to Things, now one human to 100 devices, could hit 1:100,000 over the next few years.
And there’s a characteristic of the IoT market that Cisco’s perfectly placed to address: it’s a jungle of proprietary protocols that often aren’t mutually intelligible. In a world that had DECnet, Novell NetWare’s SPX/IPX, Banyan Vines, AppleTalk, SNA and more, Cisco’s ability to route anything over the Internet stack was the foundation of its 1990s-era dominance.
Shenoy said there’s no need to replace the disparate IoT protocols out there; the aim, rather, is to handle every protocol, to “feed information into Cisco’s infrastructure”.
That infrastructure has three themes: to handle the devices themselves, intent-based networking (IBN) identifies, locates, and sets policy for IoT devices; to rescue admins from the vast number of devices, IBN provides scalable operations across all network systems; and it offers realtime machine learning and analytics to manage network issues in real time.
Shenoy said the most immediate impact of the advent of IoT on enterprise networks comes from the newly-introduced diversity of device types, with two impacts: first, stuff like HVAC systems, lighting, or healthcare devices are showing up on networks managed by IT systems; and that brings with it a new population of personnel responsible for devices.
In product terms this stands on three legs:
The Identity Services Engine has more than 600 new device categories, Shenoy explained, recognising devices based on their profile and protocols. That profile is then married with policies (with coverage of compliance and vulnerabilities), which is pushed to targets such as the firewall, to manage access control; and DNA Center to control who needs to use a device.