Eagle-Lanner tech blog

 

As the world is changing, the workforce has begun shifting to distributed locations. This teleworking model, ultimately, has accelerated the need to adopt multi-cloud platforms and services, which already caused security concerns to arise and compelled the companies and IT professionals to rethink their security approach.

It is well established that cloud adoption has become the new norm for enterprises across industries, a sine qua non of future business continuity. However, not until the recent Covid-19 crisis shook the planet did cloud computing really come into its own. Thanks to remote technologies, millions of companies around the world continue to operate during isolation with their workforce staying connected from home. Yet there is more to it — as the remote revolution remains shifting people to their home bases, companies come to realize the benefits and possibility of getting rid of their pricy real estate. Also, weaknesses and vulnerabilities of centralized computing networks have been exposed, expediting the acquisition of more remote technologies to facilitate remote working. Hence the new way businesses are going to conduct themselves has taken shape — cloud-based edge computing.

Ahead of its commercial operation launch earlier in 2020, 5G trial operations had been on the road. The global industry leaders in telecommunications, automotive, or robotics are striving to make this reality happen. In Taiwan alone, a total of nine POC (proof of concept) are in the trial phase, covering traditional manufacturing, hi-tech, medical service, government and retail industries. Back in 2018, a Taiwan-based telecommunication company already embarked on building Taiwan's first 5G-enabled pilot smart manufacturing plant to demonstrate 5G applications for wireless productivity and quality monitoring on the assembly line.

It’s not surprising that the same model applies to smart transportation. Like factories, public transportation vehicles run a variety of applications on separate proprietary hardware platforms and multiple operating systems. A city bus, for example, might have surveillance cameras, an ePayment system, and fleet management sensors on board—all running independently.

Driven by IIoT/IoT platforms, edge computing, and cloud storage, we are at a point where the factory floors around the globe are being shaken up by the new paradigm shift that re-defines a “machine” and its entire operations—Machine-as-a-Service (or Equipment-as-a-Service). These interdependent technologies have brought unprecedented interconnectivity to the machines as well as every stakeholder in the production chain.

Despite the very limited deployment cases, the merging of home and office already started years ago. Overnight, it is no longer an alternative but an imperative due to the unprecedented COVID-19 global pandemic. The disturbances brought by coronavirus have not only severely hit home to the human population but affected the global economy, all communities, our way of life – even our working habits. Over the past weeks, we’ve seen the tech giants Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Google and others adopting the WFH model. Apparently, IT experts worldwide are facing the same challenge – how to enable remote workforce immediately.

As the conventional corporate IT network relies on the WAN architecture, the IT administrators often find themselves with a never-ending headache – network configuration. The hardware-based WAN, composed of routers, servers, and other network devices across physical locations, in its nature lacks the flexibility for deploying immediate changes and updates to edge devices. Adding subsidiaries or moving the site to new locations? That’s multiple times of manual configuration and management work! In the face of fast-changing management decisions and network security crisis such as spear-phishing, CIOs and CTOs nowadays should be aware, that without the flexibility, not only would handling the regular requests and addressing the enterprise’s growing connectivity be complex and costly, but the business continuity could be crippled.

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