How does the network evolve to meet mobility requirements?

The rapidly growing demand for access to content, data, and applications, driven by a growing number of smart mobile devices that increase enterprise productivity applications, has led to growing numbers of mobile employees demanding access to enterprise applications and content anytime, anywhere.

Technologies such as virtualization and cloud services are changing the way it creates available content and applications for users on demand and accessibility. As a result, the definition of mobility translates into providing, managing, and supporting a seamless user experience across devices, applications, and networks.

However, the tools, processes, and structures available to network administrators remain mired in a world of VLANs, IP addresses, and not users, devices, and applications.

To ensure user experience consistency, troubleshooting, and auditing visibility and adequate control over the people, content, location, and time of access, the network needs to provide tools to manage mobility. The following five major stages of evolution can meet this requirement.

　　Stages of the different network

Most of today's networks are in the first phase, where different networks provide different forms of connectivity with lesser intelligence, awareness, or synergy. There is no standard model for controlling and managing corporate data and applications for user access across the park and cloud consolidation. Similarly, users ' access to the corporate network through a public infrastructure often leads to discontinuities in the user experience, such as by forcing users to use a VPN infrastructure that needs to be managed separately.

The manufacturer starts to enter the second stage, identifies the user's intelligence level to begin to obtain the establishment, the deployment and the use.

　　Stage 2– Consciousness isolated Island

The second stage is to add an intelligent layer that builds user, equipment, and application awareness, plus the ability to handle mobility across different media, locations, and times. This intelligence ensures a good user experience, while network administrators have the tools to handle the diverted of users, devices, and applications, from configuration and control to visibility, monitoring, and auditing.

With the addition of the smart layer, organizations can consider combining all the elements of a potential BYOD deployment, rather than being isolated. Situational analysis can be applied to the network layer used by the application. With the situation, the network can communicate with users and record their real needs. The network then has the ability to handle performance elements such as latency, error rates, and Run-time, providing the best quality of service (QoS) for specific users on a particular application.

　　Phase 3– Seamless Mobile experience

We will see an enterprise implementing a unified experience in which users, devices, and applications are bundled together to use a common framework for identification, policy definition, and execution. Committed to the convergence of the corporate edge, the overlay wireless network is replaced by a combination of wired and wireless infrastructure.

　　Stage 4– Cloud

Increasing mobility drives more and more applications to be hosted into the cloud, and the cloud becomes a way to provide access to data and applications everywhere.

Phase IV will allow users to access data and applications across the wired and Wi-Fi wireless infrastructure, using a variety of devices spanning enterprise parks and clouds, and allowing administrators to manage users, devices, and application tiers, rather than Mac, IP, and VLAN.

　　Stage 5– Future

In phase fifth, user and device policy and mobility management solutions will be extended to the carrier network, setting their access based on user roles and access rights. The consolidation of these solutions will provide users with a seamless experience across enterprise, cloud, and public infrastructure. This is followed by a unified user and application policy infrastructure.

The initial set of solutions for network mobility for parks and data centers is already available online. The BYOD network provides contextual information about the user's access to the network and applications, which is critical to the next phase of the network management. Network administrators will have the tools and necessary resources to provide on-demand connectivity to individual users, manage security, address user and device mobility, and minimize troubleshooting and downtime.