There’s plenty of talk about how IT is helping companies disrupt traditional business models, but similar trends are affecting how IT itself is delivered and managed too, including wireless area networks.
Sponsored by Rogers, the recent ITWC webinar “Create IT Efficiencies with Managed Network Solutions” saw Tracy Markwood, senior director of wireline product management for Rogers’ Enterprise Business Unit, outline the reasons why an organization might want to outsource its WiFi infrastructure. For most IT managers, the reasons probably weren’t all that new – ultimately the goal is to simplify and offload tasks that allow IT departments to better focus on innovation. “With more devices accessing the network, it’s not long before enterprises spend the bulk of their IT budget on patching holes,” Markwood said.
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Create IT efficiencies with managed network solutions
To learn more about managed network solutions, join us for a webinar with Jim Love ITWC’s CIO and chief content officer, and Tracy Markwood, senior director of Wireline Product.
According to research from Vision Critical, 70 per cent of IT efforts are dedicated to “just keeping the lights on,” Markwood said, with managed WiFI-as-a-Service freeing people to do things other than manage a network. The biggest concern IT departments have with challenging the current model is security, but it’s a concern that can be addressed, and there are lot of productivity gains to be had by simplifying and outsourcing this infrastructure to a third party, she said.
“Security is a growing concern for Canadian businesses,” Markwood acknowledged, citing a recent Ponemon Institute statistic that 36 per cent of Canadian businesses have experienced a significant data breach over a 12-month period in 2014. But that simply highlights the need to dump legacy WAN infrastructure that requires a lot of manual updates. “It’s really a disaster waiting to happen.”
A managed service can provide an IT manager with complete visibility of their company’s wireless network, including security elements, through a single portal, Markwood said, and allow them to be pre-emptive and proactive so that breaches don’t happen.
Most importantly, it gives IT an opportunity to contribute to employee productivity and save money, as research shows employees are no longer wanting to be chained to a desk with their multiple devices. WiFi can deliver the performance necessary to support the tools and applications modern workers are using, she said. “Why would companies pay for cabling cubicles?”
Millennials in particular want to be wireless, Markwood said, and by 2020, they are expected to make up 60 per cent of the workforce. According to research by IDC, 75 per cent of Canadians will be mobile workers by 2018, she said.
Fortunately, the same technology that organizations use to address their security concerns can also help them better understand where this often-mobile workforce spends their time so the organization can the get best use of its workspaces, Markwood said.
It’s not just about transforming how people work, she continued. WiFi-as-a-Service allows IT departments to help their organization better serve customers by using their WiFi connections to conduct analytics that in turn support business decisions. A retailer that extends its WiFi to customers can use better understand store traffic through “location heat maps,” Markwood said. This can help visualize where staff need to be deployed or where products should be placed.
For example, by deploying WiFi-as-a-Service a mall can create better mobile – and shopping – experiences for its consumers, and retail tenants can benefit from the updated infrastructure as well, since it supports “store wayfinding” – that is, helping shoppers easily find what they want quickly.
Ultimately, by spending less time managing infrastructure, IT can help the business leverage its WiFi connectivity in making strategic business decisions, said Markwood.
According to a forecast released by Dell’Oro Group late last summer, the overall Wireless LAN market will hit a market high of almost US$13 billion in 2019 – more than 30 per cent growth over 2015 revenues – in part because it’s become easier for IT departments to deploy more WiFi access.
Meanwhile, IDC expects cloud-managed WiFi to be a US $1.7 billion business by 2018, with the majority of growth in the WLAN business coming from cloud-based services and other alternative architectures rather than traditional on-premise, controller-based deployments. Earlier this year, AirTight Networks rebranded itself as Mojo Networks and launched cloud-based WiFi access that can scale up to thousands of users across an organization.