Wireless Infrastructure Management

Wireless Infrastructure Management

Wireless infrastructure management is a key requirement prior to any form of large-scale enterprise deployment of mobile or wireless technologies. It can help reduce costs of operation and to ensure the best possible return on investment from mobile enterprise initiatives. As more and more devices and applications are deployed to mobile workers, the enterprise must take more control in order to standardize the environment and to minimize support and maintenance costs. Control is critical due to the maze of devices, operating systems, wireless networks, standards, and applications that comprise wireless or mobile solutions. In comparison, the wired corporate environment is fairly homogeneous, at least from the end-user perspective, consisting of standardized network technologies, PCs, and operating systems. A challenge with wireless and mobile devices is that they have often entered usage within the enterprise as employee-owned devices which are unsupported by enterprise IT departments. Devices such as the iPAQ and Palm are increasingly used for mobile access to personal information management data such as calendar and address book functionality and are often synchronized on an ad hoc basis by employees. Some employees have taken an additional step beyond simple synchronization by connecting their devices to the Internet via wireless modems. When issues are encountered with these devices or with network connectivity, employees are increasingly looking to enterprise IT departments for support since the device is now critical to their business activities.

From a strategy perspective, the enterprise has two choices when it comes to supporting wireless and mobile devices: to continue to allow the proliferation of unsupported employee devices and applications running over a variety of networks or to begin to rein in the technology and move toward standardization. While this may require an initial upfront investment in providing devices, air time, and supporting and maintaining applications, the long-term benefits to the business are clear. They include reduced long-term support costs, ability to roll out new applications faster and more pervasively across the work force, increased end-user productivity, and increased security for enterprise data. The increase in end-user productivity is critical. In fact, Gartner estimates that lost productivity caused by handheld device technical problems could cost the average Fortune 500 corporation about $5 million per year.

Wireless infrastructure management platforms typically include control and security capabilities, real-time performance management and fault localization capabilities, and asset and configuration management capabilities. Devices must be inactivated if they are lost or stolen. This function can include temporarily or permanently locking the device from unauthorized access to information, deletion of all or a portion of the content residing on the device, or remote management of passwords and security policies. This type of management capability can help prevent accidental losses of devices from turning into significant security vulnerabilities. On the support side, technical problems need to be detected in real time and localized in terms of finding the source of the problem. This can aid support staff in diagnosing problems and fixing them as promptly as possible. An end-to-end performance view can aid in this fault localization by highlighting bottlenecks in data transmission or connectivity problems. Finally, on the configuration management side, the enterprise needs an up-to-date picture of usage activity and the devices and applications assigned to each user. This can help to show how and where wireless devices are being utilized and can also provide real-time device data such as available memory, battery level, password status, and device status for problem resolution.

One of the vendors in this wireless infrastructure management space is mFormation Technologies, Inc. Its products include an Enterprise Manager for enterprise customers and a Service Manager for wireless service providers. With Cahners In-Stat Group projecting more than 1.5 billion handsets, personal digital assistants, and Internet appliances having wireless capability by the end of 2004, companies such as mFormation are filling a critical future pain point for enterprises and for wireless service providers. While many vendors have concentrated on the wireless middleware side of the value chain, in the future the wireless infrastructure management portion of the value chain will be a critical component that should not be overlooked during enterprise deployments.