New Challenges, New Requirements

The combination of concerns on security coupled with the need for mobile and wireless being up in the top three of the priority list for CIOs and IT managers, suggests that analyzing the degree of mobility within the workforce is key to selecting the appropriate infrastructure solution.

IT managers have mobile workers in the office, as well as on the road. There are those whose jobs are entirely mobile but an increasing number of people who would characterize themselves as conventional office workers also want to connect occasionally from home, airport, the coffee shop, or even as they move about an office campus. When it comes to managing an infrastructure, it’s no wonder that many IT managers are nostalgic for the days when everything was contained within the controlled boundaries of the data centre.

Let’s look at some specifics as to how wireless connectivity makes things more complex.When seated at their desks and plugged by wire into a network infrastructure computer users will be making use of a secure, controlled environment with plenty of bandwidth, little incremental cost to the organization regardless of how much data is communicated and no limit on the duration of the connection. If they then unplug their computer and move around the building or office campus, they may have the ability to remain connected to this same organization infrastructure through an array of wireless LAN access points.

Move out of the office environment and data communications become dependent upon a range of overlapping networks. The selection of which network to use brings with it considerations of speed, security, cost and coverage.

With almost ubiquitous cellular coverage and the availability of GPRS and 3G data cards discussed above, data connectivity is available pretty much anywhere that you can make a voice call. Added to this, nearly all new laptops come with WiFi as standard and hotspots are ever on the increase. The decision is not how to provide employees with mobile IT, but how to make sure that the use of and communications made by those mobile devices is secure and cost effective. But here we meet the true challenge of mobile computing – how to enforce cost control and an appropriate level of security without getting in the way of the user doing their job.

While it may be possible for us to draw distinctions between the different types of wireless connectivity, there is no reason to believe that mobile users will share the Network Manager’s appreciation of, and concern for the security risks and cost constraints. The priorities of users are different to those of the infrastructure managers. Users care about applications – the ability to enter a sales report, complete a job sheet, record observations, query centrally held Customer Relationship Management systems, send and receive email. In many cases they need to be connected back to the central office systems, and while they are interested to know if they are connected or not, the average user is not overly concerned how this happens or the cost and exposure it presents to the organization.

For an increasing number enterprises security is a major consideration when providing access into the corporate LAN. Given the different styles of mobility outlined earlier, it is possible to apply gradations of security according to the location and connection type. Employees working within the office and making use of the in-house wired and wireless LAN can expect some level of security. However, once a user and their device roams outside of a controlled and managed network and begin communicating across the public internet, then end to end security becomes vital to protect the integrity of the whole infrastructure and encryption and the use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) is vital to safeguard the organizations information assets. We shall look more closely at Security and the role played by the VPN in the last chapter of thise series.

Thus it is the role of the network infrastructure manager to consider three main areas of concern applying to the mobile network in use at any time.

1. Security -  Is the network public, open, and therefore potentially insecure? Or is the user on a network which is owned and managed by my own, or a trusted partner organization?
2. Bandwidth – How fast is the network in use and how much bandwidth is available? Should I be tuning the use of the network to ensure that business critical and time sensitive data gets transmitted, and keep routine bulk tasks until greater bandwidth is available?
3. Cost – Is there a charge for the use of the network, and if so is it made by connect time or by data volume? If a charge is being made, I may want to defer those costly file downloads and software updates to a later time.

Taken on their own, each of these characteristics is perhaps simple to understand and therefore make the appropriate choices, but why should we burden our users with having to think about them? Their focus should on going about their day and completing their work irrespective of the availability or selection of wireless networks.

We must now consider how Network Managers and Administrators can extend their control over the networks they do not own in order provide their users with secure, persistent connections to line of business applications.  I will look closer at this in Part 5.