They say failing to prepare is preparing to fail. Well, according to new research from one of our UK partners, some network managers are finding this out the hard way as soaring mobility demands hit poorly planned wireless networks. Scalability is everything!
Damovo UK & Ireland recently surveyed 100 IT directors, each responsible for more than 1000 staff, and the findings point to wireless as absoloutely key to mobile environments; as BYOD extends and user mobile culture takes hold, more than half (55%) of IT directors feel that their businesses are ever more at the mercy of their wireless network.
The findings synch with our own survey at this years Infosec in that security remains the biggest wireless concern (over 60%) followed by coverage and performance, and the ability to support the ever-increasing influx of mobile devices onto the network.
The biggie here, though, is that 65% of the IT Directors polled confessed that they take an ad-hoc approach to extending or upgrading their wireless networks. No wonder some of them think managing wireless (47%) is a burden!
Rolling out wireless networks without any forethought or plan simply doesn't match the needs of the mobile workforce any more. As new users and new devices come onto the network, capacity demands and performance capabilities change.
Many Wi-Fi deployments are constrained by rigid architectures and costly controller environments and so need to be re-thought to cope with scalability, performance and security needed with mobile. Plugging in another controller to scale new APs, and buying new licenses every time there is a complaint (due to the inevitable poor performance) or increased demands, is not only costly, it is pretty cumbersome to manage and troubleshoot.
Of course the beauty of a cloud-enabled networking approach, where all the intelligence you need is in the APs themselves, is that adding APs (how ever many you could dream of!) and scaling your network to meet changing demand does not add complexity, cost or cumbersome management. Simple really!
This was a great survey from Damovo, and it can be found here. Also, this piece by El Reg is a good read to get more detail on the findings, plus the headline is pretty special: Hotshots' hotchpotch hotspots: Office Wi-Fi is a great big botch.