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Best Practices in Building a Wireless Enterprise

The Yankee Group 2006 Transatlantic Wireless Business Survey reveals that more than 40 percent of today's workforce is considered mobile. Increased workforce mobility is attributed to a number of factors, including new tools and technologies in telephony and wireless communications that enable a more remote workforce. The greater demand for work-life balance is also encouraging telecommuting and home-based workers while globalization is necessitating a more flexible workforce that can adapt to changing multi-geographical demands.

The growing mobile workforce is prompting many companies to change the way they build and support IT. Many are redesigning enterprise applications, services and productivity tools to fit the needs of a mobile workforce.

According to Gareth Bellis, Network Services Director for Lanworks Australia, "a wireless infrastructure improves staff performance and efficiency by empowering key users with the ability to move around effortlessly within the enterprise."

He says that as businesses expand and move, wireless technology enables rapid deployment of temporary locations, such as shop front, construction site or new office. "It also prepares an enterprise for emerging technologies including paperless transactions with digital signatures. This is particularly helpful among customer facing staff (retail, professional services)," adds Bellis.

Another emerging technology is Voice over WiFi (convergence of MobileLanVoIP), which enables staff to seamlessly, and effortlessly transition from mobile telephony to their desk phones.

Challenges

Enterprises must overcome several challenges before making the leap towards the wireless environment. Chief among this is security. Adoption of new standards, such as IEEE 802.11i, also known as WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access) offers the most promising protocol in terms of ensuring stability and security of wireless environment.

Billis notes that WPA2 using certificates (encryption level determined by the level of security required) is the only type of wireless security that is not hackable right now. "Logical or physical limitations can also be implemented on the access points and physical network devices they are attaching to in order to increase security levels, for example which protocols to allow to traverse your wireless and physical network. Combining wireless security as well as applying security restrictions across network layers is the most effective way of achieving a completely secure wireless network," he explains.

Most enterprises have legacy devices that do not support the security standards required by enterprise. Apprehension exists over ineffective security and protection of corporate data particularly among publicly listed companies that must meet certain security and legislative standards. In some conservative enterprises there maybe apprehensions over the use of new security standards such as WPA2, the simple fact is that these standards are often the most secure.

Security is subject to Moore's Law. We keep building faster and cheaper computers that can then crack previously uncrackable security standards. Therefore security must be reviewed and upgraded as a part of an enterprises IT strategy, or ITIL framework.

Implementing the right security framework, standards, and infrastructure can lead to initial slower deployment timelines and may require additional investment. However it is critical to get it right the first time.

Today's wireless technologies have a bandwidth limitation significantly more acute than wireline counterpart. An increase in the number of users will result in connection speed degradation, particularly with applications that are not geared to support web connections. When coupled with higher security requirements, the result can be even slower transfer between access points in an organization.

Best practices

It is important for an organization to set up policy as to who can access the network wirelessly and when. Once these policies are in place, stick by them.

Consider performing a capacity planning exercise at the onset to determine the type of bandwidth the organization can sustain.

A site audit or survey prior to installing wireless access points is critical to ensure that the organization provides the connectivity where it is needed. Building materials, environment conditions and interference from other wireless devices and networks influence the design and location of access points. Perform regular audit and penetration testing to ensure the connection remains stable and consistent over the life of the infrastructure.

Most organizations will have wired networks in place. A wireless infrastructure is meant to be an extension of this network, not its replacement. It is therefore important to guarantee that the wireless network is integrated into the existing infrastructure management systems.

In wireless networking a service set identifier (SSID) is a code attached to all packets on a wireless network to identify each packet as part of that network. All wireless devices attempting to communicate with each other must share the same SSID. As a rule, don't broadcast your SSID. Use MAC filtering as well as encryption for access control.

Reduce the distance the access point transmitter will reach to reduce coverage outside of the office or store location. This is difficult to do and can only be achieved by trial and error. Combine access point restrictions as well as protocol control on the wired network to restrict access to information on the local network based on requirements.

A business case for 3 Australia to go wireless

When mobile operator 3 Australia wanted to migrate its customers from 2G to 3G, it realized that beyond the preparation of a glitzy marketing campaign, it also needed to make sure its 43 retail outlets and 45 dealers would be able to cope with the onslaught of new business. But rather than opening additional store fronts it decided to consider using technology to cope with the new business potential.

Wireless technology was quickly seen as meeting that need. But with a window of less than six weeks to go from concept to deployment, the company turned to outside help. The business of designing and implementing a new solution went to Lanworks, a Sydney-based integration shop.

According to David Bickett, 3's General Manager of Consumer Sales and Micro-Business Lanworks had to come up with a solution that met specific sales, marketing and compliance requirements, and be responsive to changing customer dynamics.

Lanworks worked within the physical constraints of existing stores and accommodated 3's shift to retail kiosks. Tablet PCs equipped with 3's NetConnect Card for high-speed wireless broadband access were selected to create a wireless transaction capability for staff.

"There were a number of complexities in this project, not least of which were scale and time constraints. Lanworks needed to address and manage multiple business issues including security, protecting the integrity of the existing wired retail network; and development of digital signatures to enable the paperless contract solution," explained Aaron Dormer, Managing Director for Lanworks. "The end solution involved over 200 individual pieces of hardware and integration between multiple enterprise applications and data points."

The solution rolled out debunks the notion that retail sales need to take place behind a counter. The innovation opportunity for 3 in terms of workforce management, cue busting at peak periods, use of floor space, roaming sales professionals and obviously, ability to service business customers off site and of course, customer service over a coffee at a cafe instead of after a half hour cue at a counter.

3 understand that technology is not just about cost, but it is an investment. The return on that investment will be measured in customer satisfaction.

About the Author

Jose Allan Tan is a technologist-market observer based in Asia. A former marketing director for a storage vendor, he is today director of web strategy and content director for Questex Asia Ltd. He also served as senior industry analyst for Dataquest/Gartner and was at one time an account director for a regional PR agency.

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