How Do You Prepare Your Network for IoT and Edge Computing?

IoT and Edge changed the shape of the network. Instead of maybe a few hundred laptops, you could have thousands now of sensors, and cameras, and controllers. The challenge isn't just bandwidth anymore—getting all the traffic that you need to where it needs to go—but it's also connection density, protocol diversity, and the need for these localized decisions. So what you want to do is start with inventory and classification. Know every single device type, what it talks to, and how often. Unknown here equals untrusted. You also need to make onboarding deterministic. You need to use certificates rather than shared passwords. You want to assign devices to roles that map to VLANs or VRFs with least privileged policies from the start, which goes back to knowing what you have and what it needs to connect to. You also want to design for locality. Edge computing pushes the processing out of the data center so traffic doesn't need to hairpin back around. You want to stay local, so place the compute where those decisions are needed. Use gateways that can buffer and do store and forward, and keep only summaries of your traffic going upstream. MQTT is your friend here. You also obviously need to right-size both the wire and RF. For Wi-Fi, you need to plan on airtime and concurrency, not just signal strength. We need to ensure that everything's going to be able to get onto the air when it needs to. Use external antennas where physics dictates it. On the wired side of things, you need to confirm your PoE budgets. You also want to make sure that you have enough uplink headroom as well. And on top of all of that, you need to make sure that you have redundant power at those edge nodes. Where you might have not needed redundant power in the past, you will want it now because a lot of these sensors require PoE, and you just can't have a switch going down take out a fleet of sensors. You also want to build segmentation that sticks. Separate building systems, cameras, sensors, user devices—you want to egress restrict them to only what they need. Assume a lot of these devices just aren't going to get patched, so you want to contain them accordingly. You also need to invest in observation, right? Stream device health and app metrics, run synthetic tests on those critical functions, and where you can, automate firmware updates, and then quarantine anything that misbehaves. Don't skip facilities. This is one that is often overlooked. Edge nodes—and we kind of just touched on this, right?—they require reliable power and cooling in closets that probably never had either of those things. You're putting a lot more processing density, a lot more port density into a closet that might've just been an access closet beforehand, right? So we need to ensure that we're giving them the right power and the right cooling to make sure everything stays up and working for you. Finally, pilot, measure, scale. Start small, validate your service level agreements for latency and reliability, document that template, and then repeat. Do those things well, and IoT and Edge will become a capability of yours and not a liability.