From private cellular networks' operational infancy to grown and matured private networks
When OneLayer was founded two years ago, private cellular networks were in operational infancy. It was early adopters and their innovation teams who were playing around with private LTE and 5G networks and asking the questions: How can this technology enhance my IoT connectivity/industry 4.0? What does it take to use it as any other enterprise network?
Technology moves fast. The private cellular network market has grown and matured at record speed. Two years later, we’re seeing pilots that have converted to full-fledged operations. Enterprise operations have spread quickly from one deployment site to multiple sites – and each site has a rapidly growing number of devices.
Private cellular network challenges
Of course, there have been growing pains. Most of OneLayer’s early clients were innovators who experimented with private cellular networks, saw their potential – and experienced how ill-equipped traditional IT/OT cybersecurity systems were to deal with them. Cellular was a new animal, with different network topologies and different protocols.
To make the challenge even greater, the two major stakeholders, namely, the IT connectivity team and the cyber team, didn’t have a common meeting ground. IT connectivity were the cellular experts and didn’t know much about security; cyber were the security experts and didn’t know much about cellular. Their goals diverged, with IT prioritizing the optimization of connectivity and the maximum utilization of the technology and cyber prioritizing visibility, management and control. To top it off, both teams usually spoke different technical languages.
When targets and goals conflicted, the stakeholders’ lack of common ground prevented them from being able to look at the picture together and come up with compromises and solutions. They needed a cellular-IT/OT asset management and security translator… and that was the beginning of OneLayer.
OneLayer: Gain security and unified orchestration for your private cellular network
OneLayer Bridge grew out of the experience of bridging between the private cellular network side and the IT/OT asset management and security side without losing anything in translation. Instead of asking the cybersecurity team to become cellular experts and/or adjust their framework to the differences of cellular, we enabled the cellular network to talk to the existing IT/OT security systems in cybersecurity language. Fortunately, we found that we didn’t have to twist, bend, contort, or compromise the cellular network architecture to do so.
Helping teams in multiple countries, across multiple verticals, with a wide range of needs, gave us the hands-on experience we needed to crystallize our approach into a product solution. It has been an exciting journey to see OneLayer Bridge give enterprise teams an expanded view that includes all of cellular – without ever needing to learn the terminology of cellular.
To learn more about OneLayer Bridge, visit our product page.