The proliferation of smart and Internet-connected devices will accelerate, achieving more than three times the growth within five years than was achieved over the previous 25 years – from ten-billion such devices this year to 34-billion by 2020. The Internet of Things (IoT) will fundamentally alter the business environment and impact on all commerce, industry and society.

Companies, most of which are experiencing the transition to digital enterprises and the inclusion of multiple devices and sensors in daily operations, must prepare their network architecture to manage the scale of demand that will be placed on their networks, says networking and security firm F5 Networks Middle East and Africa senior engineer Martin Walshaw.

The amount of data that companies will have available to them from in-house devices and sensors and from external sources will be much vaster than is currently the case. Transmitting, processing and managing this amount of data to extract the maximum commercial value will require effective network architecture, automation of as many processes as possible, the use of large data centres and often, by necessity, third-party service providers.

The use of cloud service providers will ensure companies have the necessary failover mechanism when demand exceeds the capacity of their in-house networking and data centre resources. Similarly, cloud-based resources will also provide much of the data processing infrastructure to generate actionable information from the data.

Cloud platforms will also enable companies to combat the impact of opportunistic cyberattacks, such as distributed denial of service attacks. Such attacks involve the inundation of a company’s network or servers with obstructive traffic, effectively shutting down the servers and negatively impacting on customer experience.

Traffic-cleansing service providers will be able to clean obstructive traffic from legitimate traffic and then send the clean flow back to the company’s servers. This will prevent a complete shutdown of the company’s digital services, Walshaw notes.

The burgeoning use of encryption to secure personal and commercial communications will add to the demands on company networks, as data flows must be decrypted to apply networking rules to the data.