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The evolution of 5G – what you can expect
5G is more than just fast speed and greater connectivity, says Anurag Agrawal, Managing Director at Canon Middle East
The new generation of network connectivity: What 5G really means for business
The impact of fifth-generation technology (otherwise known as 5G) on our personal and professional lives will undeniably surpass the future of global telecommunications that we imagine.
5G is more than lightning fast speed, greater bandwidth, and improved uptime. Thinking about the potential behind those benefits, it’s clear that 5G technologies can potentially transform industries, from operations through to communications and smarter business applications.
It will influence every piece of technology we touch.
For organizations, with 5G enabling the real-time sending and receiving of information, we will be able to remotely interact with others, or characters controlled by others, with no lag. Training and development programs can become global. Manual and laborious tasks can be undertaken efficiently and wirelessly by robots. Local city councils can message about the best quality route into a city based on traffic conditions at any particular time of the day.
And in healthcare, for example, 5G will enable incredible innovations such as remote robotic surgery and personalized medicine based on data from wearable health trackers. But think beyond the immediate – the monitoring of our health in this manner may then result in the price of insurance premiums being dictated by our lifestyles. And all of this facilitated by 5G’s industrial-scale transfer of sensitive data.
Greater access to data requires greater protection of that data
Now while an official standard for 5G doesn’t exist yet, the technologies that will define that standard are being developed as we speak. And in developing these technologies, the industry has almost agreed on a number of use cases. Machine to machine communication (facilitating robotics and automation), seems high on the list, as does making the Internet of Things a daily reality.
The Internet of Things – ‘the interconnection that’s generated via computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data’ – is a world where all of our online/connected objects quietly pass on our data to an allocated organizational resource.
Data is already a critical asset – just imagine the amount of data that 5G will offer. The compromise of this data can have far more than purely legal repercussions. The very core of an organization can be undone if sensitive material becomes public. And the risk is not only from external parties – while some exposure comes from hackers, but data compromise is also often the result of internal misadventure or deliberate sabotage.
What does this mean for organizations? That IoT security has to be a source of major investment in the coming years.
Steps to protecting your data
There are several considerations that organizations need to be looking at how to protect data.
Secure your office network. Prevent attacks and data breaches by designing a stronger, simpler print and scan architecture with fewer vulnerabilities.
Invest in the right technology. Protect your documents with office tools that offer advanced security capabilities.
Protect your IoT. Configure your print and scan technology to match the scale and complexity of your business, while also maximizing the security settings available.
Keep your devices defended. Protect data held on devices at every stage of their lifecycle – develop a company practice to:
- Strengthen their security before use
- Secure data during operation, and
- Remove or destroy data if and when they’re removed from the organization.
Is your organization 5G-ready?
5G will be transformative for Middle Eastern businesses in every sense of the word. With this transformation, though, comes risk. With our region leading the global charge, now is the time to prepare.
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