Employee are now unchained from their desks; mobility frees the ability to work anyplace, anytime, and from any device. This is revolutionizing the type of productivity and efficiency businesses see from their workforce- large, medium, or small. While realizing business efficiency and growth, midmarket IT is struggling to balance objectives (make the network for you) and challenges (limited resources).
Midmarket IT Objectives
Leverage the network as a strategic asset
To increase employee productivity and gain competitive advantage;
Better serving customers,
Thus realizing overall growth
Midmarket IT Challenges with Mobility and BYOD
The advent of mobility and BYOD, while unleashing unprecedented levels of communication and collaboration, brings challenges to IT. Mobility enables BYOD. BYOD enables multiple types of employees, logging in from multiple types of devices, from multiple locations. Users are demanding access to the Internet and applications wherever and whenever they want. Chaos? Anyone reading this won’t need the laundry list of concerns. It’s there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kOtYC-a0rM
Midmarket IT Solutions: What to Consider
With limited IT staff wearing multiple hats, midmarket IT value a consolidated network infrastructure. At the basic level, midmarket IT need the ability to have a single bird’s eye view of the entire network infrastructure (wired, wireless, and VPN) and manage its performance- One Management. Midmarket IT also need to have a single policy enforcement system that spans the entire network ensuring information security- One Policy.
Besides simplifying the management and security of the wired/wireless network with convergence, you must consider which direction the IT department plans to embrace:
- A comprehensive, converged wired/wireless network that supports advanced features and dynamic policy or service roll-outs. If your IT department includes technical experts that can really make the network work hard to differentiate the business, see Cisco’s Unified Access BYOD Smart Solution: One Network, One Policy, One Management.
- An easy-to-use wired/wireless network, with effortless cloud-based management, where the business network is simple, reliable, and secure yet allowing lean-IT to focus on business relevance as well as network operations, see the Cisco Meraki (Cloud Managed) Smart Solution
While BYOD does bring chaos to many IT organizations it can be constrained and leveraged with Cisco’s One Network, One Policy, One Management approach. It can enable IT to spend less time running the network and more time encouraging innovation that can differentiate and transform business. It allows organizations to empower their users to work their way.
- One Network is the convergence of the wired and wireless networks into one physical infrastructure with greater network-wide intelligence, performance, and integration. IT can move away from running two disparate networks- wired and wireless- towards a converged wired and wireless network ready to leverage the opportunities provided by mobility and BYOD. IT can more easily scale to meet new BYOD and cloud demands with faster, consolidated service roll-outs and efficient change management. Promote greater business efficiency – Simplify and converge infrastructure with across-the-network consistency.
- One Policy provides context-based central policy that spans across the entire network (wired, wireless, or VPN). It simplifies the design and implementation of security policies with system-wide visibility into who and what is on the network. Midmarket IT can secure access regardless of network access medium or device; the onslaught of BYOD becomes secure BYOD.
- One Management provides comprehensive lifecycle management, performance assurance, and compliance for converged wired and wireless networks, simplifying network management across wired and wireless. Midmarket IT maintains a birds-view, comprehensive view of how the network is performing, where performance can be impacted, and proactively minimize business disruption. Granular visibility into applications, users, and devices helps improve end-user experience and productivity.
Check out the latest Cisco IT Brief featuring Gartner research and focusing on the midmarket network infrastructure to learn more. http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/newsletters/cisco_v6/issue1/index.html
Gartner recently released their Magic Quadrant on the wired and wireless infrastructure. Check out the results! http://blogs.cisco.com/wireless/cisco-leads-the-gartner-wired-and-wireless-lan-infrastructure-magic-quadrant-again/
Dear Sangita,
Are there any reference/used cases for Cisco-Meraki solution ? When you say Mid-size market, what are the metrics being considered ?
Hi Lakshman,
Yes! Currently, you can find Meraki uses cases at a couple locations: http://www.cisco.com/go/k12network and https://meraki.cisco.com/.
For “midmarket” or the “midsize” business, I generally refer to <1000 user base (extending out to <1500 users in some cases).
For combined Cisco-Meraki public case studies – stay tuned… they do exist! We're putting them together.
BYOD will continue growing as mobile device use grows. So companies will need to address such BYOD challenges as security and device management.
Does BYOD come with headaches? Of course it does. However, security issues and IT management headaches (how do I support all those devices?) can be addressed by using new HTML5 technologies that enable users to connect to applications and systems without requiring IT staff to install anything on user devices. For example, Ericom AccessNow is an HTML5 RDP client that enables remote users to securely connect from iPads, iPhones and Android devices to any RDP host, including Terminal Server and VDI virtual desktops, and run their applications and desktops in a browser. This enhances security by keeping applications and data separate from personal devices.
Since AccessNow doesn’t require any software installation on the end user device – just an HTML5 browser, network connection, URL address and login details – IT staff end up with less support hassles. Any user that brings in their own device merely opens their HTML5-compatible browser and connects to the URL given them by the IT admin.
Visit AD REMOVED BY EDITORS – PLEASE ENJOY THIS VIDEO! for more info.
Please note that I work for Ericom
Hi Adam,
Thank you for your comment. While I appreciate discussion of BYOD solutions, I’m not a fan of SEO optimization disguised as commenting. To ensure the purity of your arguments, your URLs have been updated.
Thanks!
Lauren