02 July 2017

Richard Jonker, VP of SMB product line, Netgear

Businesses must embrace new technologies to remain agile in a competitive environment, and make the move to 10G connectivity to support their increasingly burdened networks.

The Internet of Things is making its mark throughout the enterprise landscape. Although IoT may be more familiar to larger organisations, it will eventually touch and permeate throughout the supply chain, of which SMBs are a main contributor.

This is an historic transition in which a rising network of physical objects communicating via the internet, talking to each other as well as with their external environments, will become commonplace. McKinsey has predicted that there will be 26 billion connected devices in use across the globe by 2020.

In the past, enterprises have been first in the race to adopt IoT as they could afford to build fast, robust networks to support the explosion of new information. Recent research from SMB Group highlighted that IoT was near or at the bottom of SMB investment lists for the next year. But awareness is growing and will drive the need for a higher network capacity to cope with additional traffic that will be required in both small and large organisations.

Ten gigabit copper, which allows 10G bandwidth over existing infrastructure, is becoming more affordable and encouraging widespread adoption. SMBs can now embrace these new innovations and deploy 10G to deliver reliable, affordable and easy-to-use connectivity, and avoid potential network bottlenecks.

Many SMBs have already deployed 10G copper solutions as they are starting to embrace IoT to help support growth in traffic generated by the virtualised servers, storage devices and data centres that power their infrastructures. Our research shows that 61 per cent of SMBs expect to use 10G to support their business network by the end of 2017. IoT will simply contribute to aggregate traffic profiles and spread wider adoption even further.

SMBs must act now to prevent their networks from collapsing under the new weight imposed by IoT. Having the right infrastructure in place can make the difference between uptime and downtime, lost opportunities and even the worst-case scenario – business failure. 10G can help to eliminate this risk.