Warehouse workers receive incoming shipments from suppliers using their wireless PDA, and your inventory system and other key business systems are instantly up to date. Mobile delivery personnel keep store shelves perfectly stocked using accurate routing and delivery information loaded on their wireless handheld each morning and throughout the day. Retail clerks using the latest line busting technology effortlessly sell your products to happy customers who no longer have to stand in a checkout line.
At headquarters, your network operations centre runs smoothly with no wireless network outages. Last year's embarrassing attack on your wireless network is a distant memory, and the hackers are no longer a threat. Your CEO has the company's key performance indicators available on her wireless PDA from any conference room, thanks to your foresight to wirelessly-enable the executive offices. You have increased productivity, reduced costs, and are in line for a big promotion.
Then, you wake up.
The perfect world...
In a perfect world, wireless LANs (WLAN) always delivers the consistent high bandwidth required for the mission critical applications you use to run your business. There is no threat of service interruption, and therefore no loss of data. Users operate in a more flexible environment transparently roaming from one WLAN access point to another with no threat of loss of connectivity. The threat of hackers is non-existent, every application is a bandwidth-friendly thin client and employees never loose, drop or generally abuse their mobile assets. In a perfect world, the effort to manage wireless devices and the applications that run on them is no more difficult than managing your corporate desktop systems. But wireless LANs are far from perfect.
The reality of today's mobile world
For many businesses, managing wireless devices and designing applications for a WLAN environment is a significant challenge that must be addressed to gain the full advantage of this promising technology. In the real world, a successful mobile deployment involves much more than placing the latest and greatest wireless device in your employees' hands. Specifically, organisations must create thoughtful strategies to manage their mobile bandwidth, applications, devices and security. Even in the seemingly always connected world, you still have issues that need to be addressed with management technology. 802.11 sounds good and is good as long as you operate within certain parameters. These restrictions are real and must be addressed for the real-time enterprise to exist as it is envisioned.
