Enea’s IoT Connectivity Control Service (IoT CCS) has secured the 2024 Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) award in the Mobile IoT category. Now in its nineteenth iteration, the MEFFYS awards series honours the mobile ecosystem’s innovation, creativity, and ingenuity.
Enea’s IoT CCS stands out in the market for effectively addressing several persistent challenges faced by IoT Connectivity Services Providers (IoT CSPs).
Philipp Rimli, Product Manager at Swisscom, highlighted the efficiency of Enea IoT CCS: “Traditionally, delivering a private APN with an enterprise VPN is a cumbersome process for both the service provider and their enterprise clients, often taking weeks to finalise. Enea IoT CCS revolutionises this by enabling the automated delivery of VPNs for private APNs via a customer self-service portal.”
IoT CSPs face the task of providing a secure and flexible connection for enterprise customers from devices to IoT back-end services. This has typically been achieved by allocating a separate Access Point Name (APN) for each enterprise IoT customer on the mobile core, linked to an individual Enterprise Virtual Private Network (VPN), thus creating a Private APN.
This approach presents two major challenges:
- Cost, time, and scale
The deployment of individual Private APNs for each customer is expensive and time-consuming, with the manual setup of the Enterprise VPN taking weeks. This service has, until now, been exclusive to larger clients. Maintenance of Private APNs also incurs high costs for both IoT CSPs and their customers. For example, transferring a range of devices to another APN requires reconfiguring each device.
Enea IoT CCS’s Multitenancy Private APN feature allows IoT CSPs to offer a single APN extended to IoT CCS in the Cloud, which then directs traffic to the appropriate Enterprise VPN. Traffic is secured by Fortinet’s next-generation firewall, and Enterprise VPNs can be set up in seconds through an enterprise customer self-service portal. Moreover, devices can be reassigned to different Enterprise VPNs without needing reconfiguration.
- Global IoT services
The globalisation of IoT services necessitates the localisation of eSIMs in countries where permanent roaming is not an option due to commercial or regulatory constraints. The traditional use of an APN on the home mobile core is ineffective in these cases, resulting in a loss of control to local operators and challenges in maintaining consistent IP addresses and security policies.
Enea IoT CCS provides a solution by enabling global mobile network operator partners to extend an APN to it. This allows IoT service providers to offer global, secure SD-WAN functionality to their customers, rather than merely a private APN.
Roland Steiner, SVP and Head of Business Groups Network Performance and Applications at Enea, expressed pride in the recognition:
“We are immensely proud to have been selected as winners of another IoT Industry award for the eighth time. Enea IoT CCS introduces a smart and secure layer in the signaling and traffic plane over the mobile core, offering our IoT CSP customers a competitive advantage and enabling them to surpass traditional IoT connectivity services.”
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