According to studies conducted by IMS Research, the global number of industrial Ethernet nodes at supervisory and control levels will continue to grow at an average rate of roughly 15% from 2010 to 2015. However, the number of field-level nodes for industrial Ethernet will grow at an average rate of approximately 36%. These projections confirm steady industry-wide acceptance of industrial Ethernet technology, but also pose hidden threats to industrial network availability resulting from inherent challenges found at field-level environments. This paper will discuss how future industrial Ethernet networks can introduce new challenges for industrial switch reliability, bandwidth availability, switch security, switch manageability and network redundancy.