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A managed switch is a network switch where you control how traffic flows. In a factory, you use it to separate SCADA polling traffic from video camera streams so a network problem in one does not affect the other. You also use it to recover from a cable failure in under a second using ring redundancy protocols.
Managed switches are mandatory in industrial environments where OT and IT traffic share infrastructure, or where ring redundancy is required. Key capabilities:
- VLAN – separates traffic into isolated logical networks on the same physical hardware
- QoS – prioritises SCADA or real-time control traffic over lower-priority data
- ERPS / STP – network redundancy protocols for ring and tree topologies
- SNMP monitoring – sends port status, traffic stats, and error counts to a network management system
- Port mirroring – copies traffic from one port to another for diagnostics and packet capture