For enterprises in all industries, reliable wireless local area network connectivity is table stakes. It’s the backbone that delivers true mobility and, ultimately, worker productivity. But does your WLAN really drive productivity? That’s the million-dollar question. Initial WLAN investments were designed to accommodate growing mobility requirements, allowing workers to access the network and critical data applications on corporate devices or their own, from inside your four walls or out. While that is still largely the goal today, the wireless landscape has changed dramatically.
Ensuring the network can accommodate increasing wireless access and still deliver reliable coverage and performance takes planning and a bit of magic. As the number of corporate and guest users and wireless applications grow, so do the security, reliability and capacity challenges. How you configure your network is key to the performance of all network devices. Current 802.11a/c WLAN solutions provide higher throughput and faster, better coverage – even for legacy devices. But fair warning: they are not all created equal and what you don’t know could hurt the very productivity you are trying to enable.
WLANs are not created equal
Organizations that operate both industrial and non-industrial facilities have quickly learned that their wireless needs are not the same. Especially those who attempt to use enterprise- and consumer-grade technology from the predictable carpeted space to support their complex, fast-paced, challenging industrial environments. You don’t simply need a WLAN; you need the right WLAN.
Planning and implementation are no longer as simple as asking how many square feet you have, the type of materials used in constructing your building and calculating how many access points you’ll need. Today you need to know much more. How many users will be on the network? How many and what kinds of devices will they be using? Which applications will your network have to support today and in the future? How will the equipment, assets and materials that move within and throughout multiple operating environments affect your network? How would you plan and predict the changing needs of the environment based on new users, devices and applications that you plan to onboard in the foreseeable future? One thing you can be certain of is that with the growth of browser-based network access, mobile devices of all kinds and cloud-based applications will drive more traffic over the network.
Qualified access
Wireless network connectivity today goes beyond just ensuring user access and mobility. The latest generation of WLAN technology provides complete visibility to those users, the devices they are connecting with and the applications they are running. It also prioritizes bandwidth intelligently to enhance productivity. For example, a worker posting pictures on Facebook is given lower network priority compared to a sales person downloading a presentation and immediately sharing it with a customer using an online video/voice chat communications application. WLAN is now making real-time mobile business collaboration possible by enabling applications that are sensitive to latency.
Being connected is an enterprise worker’s minimum expectation, but once connected, it’s all about the quality of application performance – and a full five-bar icon does guarantee that. Today’s WLAN delivers the built-in intelligence that delivers the highest levels of mobile worker productivity.
Welcome more devices in, keep network threats out
While your own enterprise network device policies may be moving toward a more inclusive mobility model, security concerns still likely keep your entire IT team awake at night. And for good reason. As your network perimeter continues to grow beyond the four walls into the cloud, invaders await. They sit in parking lots and along roadways using crude technology to find gaps in your defense systems. They want in and you need to ensure unprotected employee devices don’t become the means to that end.
Hackers are smart. Enabling iPhones and Android devices on enterprise servers is risky because cybercriminals are sneaking Trojan-embedded apps onto the various marketplaces, which users are downloading to their devices and right into your networks. With security protection integrated with an advanced architecture, you can prevent network intrusions by identifying potential threats and immediately dropping any data packet that appears suspicious. With a firewall right in the access point, network access controls and enforces security policy even for sessions that originate and terminate in the same domain. Every packet is analyzed and rules for how to deal with that package are applied, which not only achieves better video, voice and application performance, but exceptional threat detection and prevention.
Architecting your WLAN for productivity
To succeed in an increasingly competitive landscape, enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses need to rely on their WLAN as the “data highway” over which the majority of their business information travels – and into the hands of workers. Today, mobility is no longer the primary goal of network investments – productivity is.
Anything that threatens the reliability of the network is a direct threat to worker productivity – and to the bottom line. The success of your mobility strategy will ultimately be defined by your ability to deliver a wireless network users can trust to get their jobs done effectively and efficiently, with application performance that matches their expectations. Finally, it’s important to have a system equipped with network analytics to detect and measure the key performance indicators and service-level agreements the wireless network is designed for. Having a system that proactively helps monitor, alert, isolate and remediate problems is the key to ongoing network operations success.
Sanjoy Dey leads product management and strategy for the wireless LAN division at Zebra Technologies. In this capacity, he is responsible for the global business planning, development and delivery of all wireless LAN products and solutions. Dey has more than 20 years of experience in the field of IP networking. Prior to Zebra, Dey served in key leadership roles in engineering and marketing at Cisco Systems and various startups. Dey brings a diverse technology background in voice, security, data, open source and wireless networking in the enterprise and service provider markets.
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