Enea Wins Mobile Ecosystem Forum’s
Mobile IoT Innovation Award 2024
Enea’s IoT Connectivity Control Service (IoT CCS) has won the 2024 Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) award in the Mobile IoT category. Now in its nineteenth year, the ‘MEFFYS’ awards series celebrates innovation, creativity, and ingenuity across the Mobile Ecosystem.
Enea’s IoT CSS is a truly unique offering in the market, which effectively solves multiple long-standing challenges for IoT Connectivity Services Providers (IoT CSPs).
“Delivering a private APN with an enterprise VPN is normally a tedious process for both the service provider and their enterprise customers, which can take weeks to complete. With Enea IoT CCS, we can automate the delivery of VPNs for private APNs through a customer self-service portal.”
Philipp Rimli, Product Manager at Swisscom.Today, IoT CSPs are challenged to offer a secure and flexible way for enterprise customers to connect end-to-end from a device to their IoT back-end services. Traditionally, this has been done by deploying a separate APN (Access Point Name) for each enterprise IoT customer on the mobile core, mapped to a single Enterprise Virtual Private Network (VPN), creating a Private APN.
Whether the CSP is relying on its own mobile network core or has outsourced the IoT core operations, this approach brings two main problems:
1. Cost, time, and scale
Deploying separate Private APNs for each customer has proven costly and can take weeks with the manual setup of the Enterprise VPN. As a result, this option has been limited to be an exclusive service for larger customers. Private APNs are also costly to maintain both for the IoT CSP and its customers. When customers, for instance, want to move a range of devices to another APN, each device needs re-configuration.
With the Multitenancy Private APN functionality of Enea IoT CCS, the IoT CSP extends a single APN to IoT CCS in the cloud, which separates the traffic to the correct Enterprise VPN. The traffic is protected by Fortinet’s next-generation firewall, and the setup of Enterprise VPNs is done in a matter of minutes through an enterprise customer self-service. Devices can be moved to another Enterprise VPN without any device configuration.
2. Lack of global IoT services
A truly global IoT service will require localization of eSIMs in countries where permanent roaming is unavailable due to commercial or legal reasons. In this scenario, the method of using the traditional APN on the home mobile core will not work, and the control is lost to the local operator. The devices cannot keep things such as IP addresses and security policies, and delivering a unified global connectivity service becomes mission impossible.
IoT CSPs can elegantly solve this problem and take control of the traffic by asking global mobile network operator (MNO) partners to extend an APN to Enea IoT CCS. With IoT CCS, IoT service providers can offer a global, secure SD-WAN functionality to their customers rather than just a private APN.
“We are immensely proud to have been selected winners of another IoT Industry award. This was our eighth time. Enea IoT CCS adds a smart and secure layer in the signaling and traffic plane over the mobile core. With IoT CCS, our IoT CSP customers get a competitive edge, allowing them to go beyond traditional IoT connectivity services.”
Roland Steiner, SVP and Head of Business Groups Network Performance and Applications at Enea
