Nokia charges companies in Africa, Middle East on 1oT opportunities

Nokia has implored companies in Africa and Middle East to take advantage of the huge opportunities inherent in the use of Internet of Things (IoT) in other to reduce cost, generate new revenue opportunities and also enhance their customer experience.

Speaking recently on this new internet usage drive, Director of Solution Line management in Global digital Economy Practice at Nokia, Dr Muneer Zuhdi, IoT is one element in this transformation journey and has the potential to transform every industry, even traditional ones.

According to him, IoT has been gaining great traction in Smart Cities and Nokia has been involved in multiple Smart City opportunities across the MENA region, each with their own challenges and priorities.

“Companies across the entire value chain of the telecom sector have an excellent opportunity to not only participate in this transformation but even to lead it.”

Nokia has been extremely active in IoT by optimising our products to support IoT applications, investing in IoT technologies, acquiring innovative companies, collaborating with IoT technology leaders, and building IoT ecosystems to develop solutions covering different industries. This multi-prong approach enables Nokia to partner with our MENA customers in this IoT journey and provides them the most innovative end-to-end IoT solutions,” says Dr Zuhdi.

He said the IoT platform from Nokia, branded as IMPACT, comes pre-integrated with several use cases that improve people’s lives while making businesses and cities smart, safe, and sustainable. Finally, applications like smart parking achieve multiple goals in terms of making people work and live smarter by eliminating time waste, generating new revenues for businesses or cities, and reducing road congestions, pollution, and fuel waste,”

According to him, security remains a grave concern, particularly in the wake of recent ransomware attacks, it is therefore important to evaluate the end-to-end security for the entire IoT solution solution, including devices, network, platform, cloud, and application security.

“This is the approach for the Nokia security products which include end-points, gateway, DNS, and platform security, along with certificate management, security management, and identity & access management.”

He said the IMPACT IoT platform allows secured and authenticated collection of IoT data, which is only distributed to authorised applications and end users.

Speaking further, Dr Zuhdi explained that the NetGuard End-point Security provides a network-based anti-malware solution combining monitoring, detection, and mitigation for smart devices and IoT end-points. When the IMPACT IoT platform detects abnormal traffic, it sends a notification to the application or end user and has the capability to update the firmware to fix a security hole or instruct the network to stop the device from transmitting.