CYBER SECUIRTY
without having to transform entire networks to do so.” Spellicy of VMware agrees that private networking is the first real 5G footprint: “It all starts with private networking and it moves from there to edge computing,” he believes. “For more advanced use cases in areas like manufacturing or healthcare and smart medicine, that is going to require an additional network. Of course, 4G provides quite a bit of capability for some of the more basic services. But when bandwidth and latency become constrained, 5G will be the ‘go to’ network. Consider also verticals like mining and exploration which use automated guided vehicles. These require very low latency communication in order to control them. In other industries, like manufacturing, you're going to need maybe more bandwidth, but you can get away with higher amounts of latency.” The communications service provider, he says, has an opportunity to help bring such capabilities to the customer. Saratendu Sethi is Vice President of AI with GEP, a specialist in the field of procurement and supply chain solutions. His company is building use cases that take technologies such as 5G, IoT and edge compute to customers to solve specific supply chain problems: “Even before the pandemic, the supply chain was undergoing a whole process of digitalization,” he says. “At the core of a digital supply chain, what's important is data and end-to-end connectivity. And this is where 5G comes in. The promise of 5G in terms of accelerated data speeds to reduce latency, in connecting significantly more devices, in enabling IoT, is phenomenal. For example, we are directly working with customers who are using IoT to enable ‘just in time’ manufacturing by tracking parts in real-time as
30 | Cyber Risk Leaders Magazine
they are moving from the assembly line, rather than waiting for a scheduled arrival. We are building opportunities to keep these manufacturing processes running throughout. 5G allows us to connect more and more devices, so we can actually track goods at SKU level as they're being manufactured and as they are moving across warehouse distribution centers.” By way of conclusion, Nokia’s McCabe considers web scale players and what they are doing with deployments in this area: “It isn't a simple competitive dynamic,” he explains. “There's a lot of cooperation going on, and there's real ambiguity about the roles that the ecosystem players will take in the long run. We see many examples where web skills are partnering with CSP companies at a national level and working together to deploy edge data capabilities to host applications. There are other cases where the web skills are actually working to develop telco cloud solutions to support the workloads of the CSP themselves. When we talk about the role of the web scale, it's very much a space to watch. The dynamics are not fixed and are going to change a good deal over the coming years.”