Industry 4.0’s promising technology trends encompass areas and applications such as the Internet of Things, cyber security, the cloud datacenter, horizontal/vertical system integration, data mining/analytics, AR, VR, 3D printing and robotics; what all these technologies have in common is that they must rely on some sort of networking architecture/framework in order to deliver the innovation, profits, benefits and convenience promised.

However, in order to manage and meet the demands of a telehealth system on which the medical staff depend for delivering top of the line care in the form of video, voice and data transfer directly to patients located in different locations, a robust and scalable network is an absolute must.

Over the past two years hundreds of enterprise, including those in the retail sector, have been adapting and deploying Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) solutions to keep up with the exponential increase in the demand for network bandwidth on which more and more resource-hungry applications are run, in order to not only facilitate omni-channel integration but also to deliver the next generation store experience for today’s consumers and shoppers. This is especially true and important for growing organizations with global presence, seeing as resources within such businesses are often spread out and shared locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.

Since the trend of IoT (Internet of Things), energy sectors all over the world have been frequently the main targets for deliberate malware as consequences of planned attacks can highly devastate reliability, serviceability and public trust. One of the recent incidents was the power cut during Christmas season in Ukraine, 2015, followed by a series of cyber attacks to local energy companies. Large parts of the state were under power black-out. This incident revealed that ICS systems today are practically vulnerable to deliberate attacks.

A report released by U.S. Energy Department suggested that the number of cyber attack incidents already reached the “red-alert” level, which also indicates how vulnerable the security is for today’s critical infrastructures. In fact, besides the common targets for hackers such as power plants and manufacturing sites, there was a reported incident in 2016 that a water company in U.S.A experienced data breach.

Nowadays, utility productions, such as oilfield, petroleum refinery, and offshore gas drilling, have become more and more digitalized and connected. Devices deployed such as PLCs, HMIs, SCADA, sensors and embedded computing systems are inter-connected operational technologies (OT) in order to optimize automation and productions. Though digitalization and interconnections of OT devices have increased productivity and outputs for the oil and gas industry, the door is opened to cyber attacks at the same time. As a matter of fact, the numbers of cyber attacks to utility production industries have been rising continuously. According to researches, over 60% utility companies have encountered at least one attack in past years and petroleum industry is listed as one of the most targeted industries for cyber attacks

The manufacturing sector has undergone a rapid evolution since the introduction of advanced, intelligent and connected industrial control systems and factory automations, due to the challenges from globalized competition, frequent changes in raw material costs and newly emerging market demands. Today, it is common to see that major manufacturing plants have adopted a great number of IT and OT technologies, which not only optimize their productiveness, but also enable them with 24/7 real-time visibility and management of their manufacturing environments. In general, this is the generation often referred as Industrial 4.0.