In this connected age, the newest threat facing enterprises isn’t the fastest, most fabulous new smartphone or the coolest powerful laptop.
It’s the printer. Or the wearable in your employees’ pockets, the smart light fixtures, or even the badge access system.
More and more devices are connecting to the network to increase visibility, develop an ecosystem of applications, and report data back to analytics engines that process hundreds of gigabits of data every day. And the one thing they all have in common? They are using Wi-Fi to do it. 
Employers used to be able to design a network by saying “I’ll need 2 ports per cubical and therefore I’ll need 300 switch ports for building A”. It was very straightforward and the biggest problem was related to how to keep employees from installing unsanctioned software on their desktop machine.
We’ve come a long way since then, first seeing the shift to non-ethernet devices connecting to the network, then with BYOD driving that number to 3-5 devices per user, the prevalence of “Shadow IT” apps on all these mobile devices, and now with the emergence of “Bring Your Own Thing” - BYOT.
Internet of Things: How many connected devices?
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fundamental shift in networking. There is no way to plan “x devices per user” because all sorts of non-user devices will be connecting and sharing information. Most of them will not support username/password authentication, so identifying the type of device, who needs access to it, and what it can do on the network can be an overwhelming challenge when using legacy network equipment.
This is where a highly-intelligent, distributed architecture with a focus on securing and connecting devices really comes into play. My next several blogs will go through how Aerohive is the vendor to help your business connect, scale, and secure all the Internet of Things devices showing up on your network.
Let’s start with secure connectivity.
Assuming the majority of IoT devices will not have complex Wi-Fi management, most will likely require a pre-shared key rather than support a username/password for WPA2-Enterprise.
Aerohive has a unique feature that allows users or administrators to generate a Private Pre-Shared Key (PPSK) to ensure that each device is securely connected to the Wi-Fi network. More importantly, using PPSK, administrators can create groups of keys that define what permissions should be assigned to a device connecting with that key - for example, the “printer group” may assign a device to the printer VLAN, limit access via firewall policy to limited outbound destinations, and rate limit access to ensure there is no misuse.
This means that administrators will not need to configure multiple SSIDs just to support different types of devices - assuring the Wi-Fi connectivity for all users and devices will be improved simply due to available airtime! :-).
Aerohive is prepared to support the IoT movement - and the more devices, the better. So let’s get moving and BYOT!