November 2011

The rapid growth of smartphones and tablets, plus staff bringing their own devices to work is making many IT departments alter their networks says Chris Kozup, senior director, EMEA marketing, Aruba Networks. It could also save money.

You don’t have to look too far to realise that technology trends in the consumer market are driving significant changes in the approach that enterprise IT must take when exploring new technologies.

Facebook, tablets, YouTube and smartphones have all made their way into the enterprise, and more often than not for legitimate business reasons. With the pace of innovation in consumer technology accelerating, organisations must be proactive to determine how to best adapt new technologies to the needs of the business.

Companies should pay special attention to the intersection between unified communications (UC) and mobility. The promise of high quality, lower cost communications to your mobile device of choice can mean significant cost savings for the business.

The availability of highly secure, robust wireless networks is allowing enterprises to rightsize their access networks which, in turn, results in cost savings due to a reduction in the number of Ethernet switches required for connectivity. Now, applications like Skype and Facetime are challenging incumbent PBX and video conferencing systems in most enterprises. The next phase of rightsizing, driven by consumer voice and video applications on mobile devices, has arrived.

The unstoppable growth of smartphones and tablets

Gartner Research forecasts that the growth of PC softphones, mobile softphones and IP-enabled wireless telephones will pass that of wired IP phones in the business telephone market between 2011 to 2015.

According to Gartner's report Forecast: Business Telephones, Worldwide, 2006-2015, TDM wireless telephones and both analogue and digital telephones are in decline. The rapid adoption of softphones on mobile devices and wireless phones is driving this transition and underscores the need for a highly-secure, intelligent wireless network.

So what does this mean for enterprise IT? With the right preparation, IT can demonstrate significant cost savings to the business by taking advantage of the plethora of new mobile voice and video applications. However, preparation is the key.

Key steps for preparing the network

The first step is to ensure pervasive, high performance wireless connectivity. Wi-Fi has long been the preferred connectivity method for bandwidth-hungry mobile applications. IT departments have embraced new standards like 802.11n and shifted network design principles to favour Wi-Fi as a primary access network.

Of course, the quality of voice and video communications can only be as good as the network that carries the traffic. As such, IT should evaluate the ability of the Wi-Fi network to deliver the intelligence required for voice and video applications at scale.

As a second step, IT should understand the scale and density requirements of these mobile applications and devices and then architect the wireless network so that it can ensure appropriate application service levels. For the most part, a Wi-Fi infrastructure's scale is defined by the number of access points deployed and the number of clients each serves.

When scaling the infrastructure, several factors must be considered including how and where the access points are placed, their ability to dynamically adjust channel and power settings, and support for intelligent load balancing and multicast.

The wireless network should also be able to identify the applications it carries and adjust the quality of service it delivers accordingly. This is important because voice and video applications behave differently to traditional data applications.

For example, the network may need to give higher prioritisation for voice traffic than it would for email traffic. The ability of the network to do this type of dynamic fingerprinting of applications allows the appropriate policies to be applied and helps to ensure smooth performance for real-time communications and multi-media applications.

With the advances in wireless networks both in terms of throughput, design best practices and intelligence like application fingerprinting, IT can now start to realise the promise of the mobile enterprise. Of course, much in the same way as consumer applications like Skype and Facetime are being brought into the enterprise, so too are consumer devices.

At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, more than 100 new tablet devices were introduced, each of these destined to seek a connection to your network sometime soon. Before we can consider the chapter closed on the best practices for delivering robust mobile UC, we must also ensure IT can define an acceptable use policy for any mobile device, securely and with confidence.

Bring your own device

The bring your own device phenomenon continues to accelerate and with most of these devices lacking an Ethernet port, wireless has become the de facto connection method. The cost of securing and managing this diversity of mobile devices can quickly tax the most robust IT department.

To avoid this, many enterprises are exploring self-service provisioning tools that allow the user to associate their device, register it and receive enterprise-authorised security credentials for that device. This type of mobile device access control allows IT to maintain control without consuming precious IT resources.

Therefore, as consumer technology trends continue to evolve at an astonishing pace, enterprise IT has a choice: they can be proactive and determine how these new technologies can deliver business value, or they can risk being left behind.

Much in the same way as 802.11n is allowing companies to save money by reducing the number of switches they are purchasing, so too are consumer communications applications like Skype and Facetime reducing the reliance on expensive enterprise UC systems. Still, the quality of performance for these applications is linked to the ability of the wireless network to both understand and deliver them per application performance enhancements without IT intervention.

The era of consumer technology has arrived and with the right planning, IT can lower costs while improving user satisfaction. A true achievement.