A digital-ready infrastructure

Enterprises need to build on a foundation that can help innovate at speed, keep up with change, and prepare them for what can come in the future. Digital transformation requires a digital-ready infrastructure, which is simple, intelligent, automated, and secure. There are multiple elements of the digitization infrastructure of an organization as we will see in Figure 1 next. We can broadly classify the infrastructure into three parts:

• A host of input and output systems that interact with the human world. This would include IoT systems (such as wearable sensors, the sensors in vehicles, homes, and manufacturing plants), mobile systems, CCTV cameras, and environmental sensors.
• The underlying network infrastructure that carries the data from the I/O systems to the processing centers and back to the I/O ecosystem. This would typically include the wireless networks in the IoT access domain (for example, IoT technologies such as LoRa, 6LowPAN, and Fog Area Network), mobile networks, Wi-Fi networks, and wired connectivity for higher data rates.
• Processing centers that process the inputs generated from the I/O ecosystem. This would typically be the data center (DC) in the organization. However, with the demand being very dynamic within the DC, cloud providers are becoming increasingly relevant as a part of this block. Some processing can also be done closer to the edge and that is where the Edge computing platforms become relevant, for example, a computing blade within a router, or a Linux-like computing platform that is available within a router/switch as in a Cisco IOx application environment.

This entire infrastructure has to be simple, highly secure, and automated so as to be flexible enough to meet any changing requirements. We will cover these requirements in detail in subsequent sections of this chapter: