(Sidebar to Abby Strong's article, Introducing Aerohive's Mobility Suite)
“Soon there will be more mobile devices than toothbrushes in this world,” said Jonathan Chadwick, CEO of VMware, when commenting on their acquisition of AIrWatch last week.
With Gartner predicting that there will be over 1.28 billion smartphones and 665 million tables in use by 2016, administrators are going to have to redefine how they manage enterprise networks. The “edge” of the network now extends to these mobile-first users who are constantly blurring the lines between “corporate-issued” and “BYOD” with the transition of consumer devices to business productivity tools. IT administrators will be asked to do more with less, with “More” extending to all different types of users, devices, and applications in addition to managing the infrastructure.
If we take a step back and identify use cases facing IT admins with all these combinations of users, devices, and applications, we can narrow them down to 5 major categories:
- Guests - transient visitors who want network access for a limited period of time
- Employees with personal devices who just want to access the Wi-Fi to offload expensive data contracts
- Employee BYOD - device purchased by the employee, sometimes even with a stipend issued by the employer, intended for use as a business device
- Corporate-issued device: a device issued by the employer for business purposes
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Content-controlled device: A device intended for an extremely specific purpose, such as taking credit card transactions in a retail store or for Electroni
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c Medical Records (EMR) in a healthcare facility
If you order these options from left to right, they create a spectrum where the Guests on the far left require the least amount of control over the device itself to the far right, where control over the device is the most important variable. ==>
Please read Introducing Aerohive's Mobility suite to learn about Aerohive's solution for managing all of these devices on your Wi-Fi network.