What the Future Holds

Enterprises often initially struggle with the added financial burden of deploying, managing, and operating WLANs; over time, their growing dependence upon the service makes it unacceptable to have interruptions. What initially begins as an overlay network becomes a top priority when broken because of the sheer number of employees relying on the WLAN. In the future, as services grow in demand or as advanced technologies are added onto the original WLAN architecture, the company will wrestle with the growing need for access and the subsequent financial challenges.

Now that the WLAN is finding its way into the general office population, the need for additional services such as guest access and voice are becoming part of the general architecture. Being highly security-conscious, the company must also identify a mitigation plan for rogue device detection.

Guest Access

At present, the company does not provide guest access as a common practice. Much of the need did not exist initially, but as the market adoption starts to climb, this added-value service becomes more realistic. The company sees the use of guest access not only as a convenience but also as an additional layer of security.

Voice over IP

Today, the company is currently adopting Cisco VoIP to offset climbing telephony costs and to take advantage of business-enabling applications and services that can be provided through a converged solution. One of the VoIP technologies used is Cisco IP Communicator, which is the software-based solution that makes the PC a fully functional IP phone. Over time, the wireless-enabled PC will need to be supported by a voice-enabled WLAN.

Many challenges lie ahead for this company when it comes to delivering a voice-enabled WLAN. Issues about telemetry and location services that allow a phone to be located in case of emergency will be a major focal point. Most important, the re-architecture of the WLAN to support better throughput, quality of service (QoS), and roamingboth Layer 2 and Layer 3will need to be completed to support applications and services that continue to emerge.

Rogue Access Point Detection

Rogues APs comes in two flavors: those that are friendly and those that are not. Friendly rogues are not malicious, but they are also not wanted. Unfriendly rogues are considered malicious and not wanted.

Without a plan in place to identify either one, the company has no mitigation option available. Additional work is being carried out to manage the threat of rogues in the enterprise. The variety of tools and management systems that exist on the market today are being evaluated to address this issue.