Today, the separation between wired and wireless solutions for access connectivity is going away. Users expect to connect to corporate network resources regardless of whether they are connected on wired or wireless media.
This is ratified in the recent 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure report. Gartner found that enterprises would not like to make “trade-offs between the security and management of their wired and wireless access networks.”
With enterprises dealing with limited IT resources, they require a single integrated or unified network management solution to provide a view of both wireless and wired users. Even more critical, enterprises also need a single solution for policy enforcement across wired and wireless users from.
Both of these critical functionalities must come from a single vendor solution. Gone are the days where a vendor can just offer a wireless solution alone or just offer a wired solution alone.
But let’s make sure to distinguish between unified network management view of wired and wireless users versus a truly unified access solution.
Many vendors can offer a unified management view of wired and wireless networking devices. This allows IT administrators to get a single view of their wired users on switch or router ports and wireless users on access points. While this “single pane of glass” view of the network is certainly useful and important, it’s insufficient of what’s needed today to effectively run an integrated wired and wireless network to improve IT’s efficiency.
A unified access solution not only includes this “single pane of glass” view, but it also allows IT administrators to have user-based contextual policy enforcement across both wired and wireless users. IT administrators need the ability to define permissions to the network based on identity, device type, location, and time of day. Then they want to use those objects for both wired and wireless users, ensuring consistent permissions to the network regardless of connection type.
As Gartner verified, IT administrators are seeking end-to-end access layer vendors like Aerohive that provide integrated network management of wired and wireless clients AND even more importantly, unified contextual-based policy enforcement across wired and wireless clients.