Extreme Connect 2025
May 19-22
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Faced with population growth, growing economic disparity, fears about climate change, and an increasing digital divide, state and local governments across the globe are looking at digital transformation as a means to to achieve better environmental, social, and financial outcomes (IDC).
Smart communities achieve these objectives by linking devices, applications and people to streamline city functions, enhance communications and provide better services to its constituents. The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices/sensors is making it easier to monitor and control municipal functions like parking, traffic, lighting, policing, water and energy flow, and garbage removal. However, the real power lies within the data collected from these IoT devices which offer a much more granular and in-depth understanding of city functions. This data can be invaluable in future planning initiatives and in achieving the desired long-term outcomes.
Public safety is an important component of smart cities/ communities, with many expanding their deployment of video surveillance to both deter crime as well as collect invaluable information from specific locations or events. Enhanced public safety can also include connected policing — with videos from dashboard camera, body-worn cameras and other feeds — to give those in command a multi-dimensional view of what is happening on the ground.
Throughout the smart communities are smart buildings which deliver energy and costs savings by using automated processes to control operations including heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lighting, security and other systems — while at the same time improving the comfort for its occupants.
The interconnection of IoT devices, applications, and people is highly dependent on the right network infrastructure. And that dependence increases as more and more critical services, data, devices, and sensors are brought onto the network — demanding new levels of efficiency, performance, availability and security.
Extreme Networks' secure and automated smart city architecture offers a number of key attributes to help local governments implement their smart community initiatives. This paper will examine each of these:
Simple and Automated Networks; Increasing Efficiency and Reducing Costs
As the goal behind smart community initiatives is to increase efficiency, improve municipal services, and reduce costs, it’s important that the network infrastructure also support those goals. The foundation of Extreme Network’s smart city architecture is an innovative networking technology called Fabric Connect. Fabric Connect represents a simpler way to design, build, manage and troubleshoot networks that has been field proven to reduce operational costs by as much as 66%, while at the same time, increase time to service by 11x2. It is standards based, network virtualization technology that enables multiple isolated, secure virtualized networks to run as “ships in the night” over a single physical network. These virtualized networks are inherently secure and can be set up and changed very quickly with edge-only provisioning, eliminating instability and the risk of errors.
In short, Fabric Connect offers cities network-wide automation that provides simple “plug and play” operation — while at the same time improving both the stability and the security of the network. Specific attributes of Extreme’s Fabric Connect technology include:
Inherent Network Security Through Secure Zones and Prevention of Lateral Movement
Continued investment in digitization and IoT has huge implications on security. As more devices connect to the network, the potential attack surface widens, and new security measures need to be considered.
One very effective means of securing the network is through network segmentation. According to Rob Joyce, former NSA official, “A well segmented network means that if a breach occurs, it can be contained. The difference between a contained and uncontained breach is the difference between an just an incident and a full-blown catastrophe.” In the smart city environment, the isolation and security of critical functions such as traffic control, smart grid applications, water management and more — is an absolute necessity.
Extreme Fabric Connect enables the creation of thousands of private virtual networks to protect and isolate these critical services. Each of these virtual service networks (VSNs) is completely isolated without any IP reachability in or out (unless specified). And as an added benefit, these secure virtual networks can be deployed quickly and without complexity at the network edges.
Some of the attributes of this capability include:
Scalable and High Performance Video Surveillance Deployed with Ease
Security and safety are direct influencers on the quality of living within the city and its surroundings. Video surveillance is a major contributor to this with many cities expanding its deployment.
Today, smarter IP cameras provide greater capabilities beyond generating and transmitting video, they can also communicate with centralized management systems delivering video analytics output, alarms, and metadata alongside the video stream. These smarter video surveillance systems need the right network infrastructure to ensure the scale, performance and quality of the video. Designed to simplify any video surveillance solution (IP, hybrid, unicast or multicast), Extreme Fabric Connect ensures that the network is ready to handle even the most complex city-wide video surveillance deployments.
Some specific attributes of this solution include:
High-Performance Wi-Fi that is Simple to Deploy and Manage
According to IDC, public Wi-Fi is the most widely deployed smart city use case and it is a great starting point in connecting citizens, businesses and visitors. However, Wi-Fi is also critical in enabling many other smart city applications such as public safety, IP Video, traffic and parking controls, air quality and many others.
Extreme offers powerful ‘best fit’ Wi-Fi offerings that deliver superior quality of experience to mobile users and that can adapt to the diverse wireless requirements and environments typical in any Smart City deployment.
Key capabilities include:
Visibility, Control, and Security for IoT Devices
In a smart community implementation, the network must be capable of connecting the broad range of IoT devices and users, however, it must be very selective in doing so. Authorized IoT devices should be expeditiously and effortlessly on-boarded, while unauthorized devices must be prevented from gaining access to the network. The best way to implement this is with policies that define which devices, users, and apps can access the network resources — with this policy implemented consistently across the network.
These solutions match granular controls over endpoints that are requesting on-boarding to the network. Endpoints with attributes, such as user, time, location, vulnerability, or access type, to create an all-encompassing contextual identity. Role-based identities follow a user or IoT device, no matter from where or how it is connected to the network. Compromised devices are quickly identified and quarantined from the network.
In addition, isolation of groups of IoT devices performing a specific function or role is supported by assigning each of these functions their own secure segment. This not only protects the rest of the network and applications from that particular group of devices, it also enables much better visibility and control over the traffic within that specific segment. Extreme Network Access Control working in conjunction with Fabric Connect automatically identifies, classifies and onboards the IoT device, applies policies, then provisions an end-to-end secure segment (L2 or L3) from the point of ingress to the point of egress. As an added benefit, full network service automation and dynamic secure attachment of wired and wireless IoT devices is delivered — dramatically reducing provisioning at the edge of the network.
Centralized Management, Visibility, and Control
In the smart city environment, centralized management, visibility, and control is critical to ensuring that the network delivers the desired efficiency and cost reduction objectives. Extreme Networks provides a true 360 degree view of the wired and wireless network, users, devices and applications with context and scale through integrated management, analytics, and policy. It is designed to provide granular insights, visibility and automated control across the network — from the wired and wireless edge all the way to the data center in order to streamline and simplify network operations.
Extreme Centralized Management tools offer the following benefits:
Summary
Extreme Networks is helping cities across the globe digitally transform so that they can achieve their desired environmental, social, and financial outcomes. We understand that the right network foundation is paramount in facilitating this transformation and increasing efficiency, improving service, and reducing costs. Cloud-managed networking is the first step to realizing the Infinite Enterprise, an infinitely distributed, enterprise grade network, that delivers personalized, consumer-centric experiences whenever, wherever you are.