Making wireless dreams a reality

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 center 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, organizations 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.

Bandwidth
With 11 Mbps of 802.11b bandwidth, there is more bandwidth than on your old 10 Mbps LAN. This means there is plenty of network capacity to run applications designed for a high speed, always-on network. Or is there?

The actual throughput of a WLAN is dependent on several factors, such as the quality of the radio signal emitted from the WLAN access points (APs). Signal quality is affected by several factors such as distance from the APs, obstructions between the APs and the devices, radio interference, and many other factors. As the signal degrades, bandwidth reduces until finally there is no longer a connection between the wireless device and the APs. This loss of a network connection can prevent even the best-designed applications from functioning, especially if they rely on an always-on, high bandwidth network environment. And if your WLANs are at remote locations, the actual bandwidth available to a remote device communicating with headquarters servers is limited by the lower speed of your WAN. An 11 Mbps WLAN device may actually seem slow if communicating over a 64 Kbps frame relay cloud.

An infrastructure with built-in efficiencies for moving applications and data across networks of all speeds, and of differing reliabilities will pay off in the long run. File transfers pick up where they left off when a network failure occurred. Updates to software packages are faster thanks to byte-level-differencing technology. Device management tasks dynamically adjust the bandwidth they consume to allow mission critical tasks to be performed. But what about the applications mobile workers will depend on to do their jobs? How much bandwidth will they consume?

Applications
The thin client versus thick client battle is far from over. One would think that a network providing high bandwidth with always-on connectivity would lend itself to thin client architectures. But since consistent high bandwidth and persistent connections are not guaranteed in the wireless environment, application architectures must include the possibility of a lost network connection.

Thick client architectures must also consider whether there is reliable high-speed access to corporate databases. If the network must be available for an application to access a database, you may be negating the benefits your WLAN brings to the corporation by finding workers struggling with running applications, unable to perform their jobs. Considering application architectures that include both "online" and "offline" approaches may be the answer. In the offline world the application is always available and data is refreshed once a day, periodically throughout the day, or on a transactional basis. Efficient synchronization and transfer of database records between the handheld application and the headquarters database will be an important consideration when architecting these offline applications.

Devices
So how do you manage thousands of remote wireless devices? Can't you use your existing enterprise management system? The total cost of ownership of a handheld device used for business purposes is estimated at $3,000 per year--more than the annual TCO for laptops.

Experts blame the increased TCO on additional administration, training, and maintenance services that must be performed by a team using management software designed for desktops and servers. Adding wireless connectivity increases the annual TCO per device to $4,400. If you have ever tried to install and configure a WLAN card on your laptop, you already understand the reasons for this leap in management costs. The myriad of settings required to establish communications with a wireless access point make wireless devices much more labor intensive than simply plugging your desktop into a network outlet.

And then there is software distribution and management. If your organization is relatively new to the wireless world, then it's likely your wireless applications are new as well. This means more frequent software updates as new features and enhancements are incorporated. A solid policy on how you will distribute and update these new applications should be in place to ensure a successful wireless device rollout.

Devices running Palm and Microsoft operating systems have become as fun to tinker with as your kid's video games. This tinkering can lead to device configurations that make the device about as useful to your business as a video game. The definition and enforcement of comprehensive device configuration policies can be another method of reducing TCO for these devices. One critical component of defining and enforcing device configuration is establishing consistent and effective mobile security standards.

Security
WLANs have a built-in security technology called Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) that provides a measure of security for data flowing across the wireless portion of your network. However there have been many reported cases of serious weaknesses in WEP that are easily exploited by hackers. And since WEP only encrypts data over the WLAN, it travels in the clear from the wireless access point to its final destination.

Additional layers of security that provide data encryption from the device to the data center should be incorporated to ensure data is not tampered with, or read by unauthorized personnel. This may include SSL encryption, VPN technology, file encryption, or other means. Companies are increasingly looking to "thin" VPN technologies like SSL as a more cost effective and easy-to-implement solution than traditional "thick" VPN technologies that require client software to be installed on the device.

Finally, there is always some risk that a handheld wireless device will be lost or stolen. So a method of securing access to the device, and protecting the data stored within the device are required to ensure your private corporate information is not compromised.

The Reality of 802.11
WLANs and wireless devices can help companies implement new ways of doing business. They can increase the productivity of employees in the warehouse, in your mobile fleet, in retail locations, and in corporate management.

There are some unique challenges in managing wireless devices, and architecting wireless applications. With a solid plan, and the right infrastructure in place, maybe that big promotion will become more than just a dream.

biography
Robert Morrow joined XcelleNet in April 2001 and is currently senior director--sales consultants. Robert has 18 years of experience within the hi-tech industry, most recently as director of development for Sterling Commerce and senior account executive with Entrust Technologies.