Unified access networks is an emerging culture of enterprise communications and is the direct result of the proliferation of easily portable mobile devices.
As employees are becoming more reliant and dependable on these devices, businesses are finding that there is an increasing demand to meet these expectations and develop with this new era. Whilst many businesses are concerned about enterprise mobility management (EMM), ALE, marketed under the brand Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, leading providers of enterprise communications solutions and services advises that this is an opportune time for businesses to evolve.
An all-encompassing approach, EMM is a secure way for employees to utilise smartphones and tablets for work purposes. Not only is it innovative, it is also designed to meet the immediate needs of organisations whilst preparing their networks for the future, with capabilities that gradually increase mobility, support BYOD and allows for the effortless transition to the cloud.
“The implementation of a solid and reliable EMM strategy equips employees with the right tools to perform work-related duties on mobile devices in turn increasing productivity. Selecting the best EMM tools, CIO’s need to consider employing a system that is engineered to handle all of an enterprise’s access control needs which also has the capability of notifying the enterprise network infrastructure of the rights and bandwidth permitted to any user or device,” explains Mauro Rizzi, Director of Business Management for Networks, ALE South Europe Middle East & Africa.
Rizzi adds, “The main trend that is bringing mobility to the forefront of network infrastructure is BYOD. The mobile enterprise must provide ubiquitous connectivity and quality access to the applications users need, anywhere, anytime with any device. In the mobile enterprise it is important to note that user experience matters. It must be intuitive and available in wired or wireless environments as well as provide the freedom to seamlessly move between whichever media and device that is preferred at any given time.”
Addressing safety concerns is an important factor, because EMM is not under the control of in-house IT teams there is a high risk of unauthorised access to sensitive private company information whenever devices and applications are in use. Businesses therefore are not only under pressure to serve the communication needs of employees, they also need to ensure that they are securing their networks from unwanted access.
Looking at EMM holistically, businesses need to invest in safe and secure solutions that offer all the elements that enterprises need to create agile architectures and services. “Choosing the solutions with a complete portfolio is valuable in that it offers businesses a variety of ways to enable employee mobility and seamless communication over a personal cloud and an enterprise network. Achieving a true mobile enterprise requires a complete network upgrade from access to the core and this can be done gradually.”
“The operational savings long-term is greater than the cost of new hardware. Savings are achieved through automation, unified access policies, energy efficient hardware, improved employee productivity and customer satisfaction. The result is a simplified, resilient and intelligent network that can scale and be open for the wave of innovation in the upcoming years,” concludes Rizzi.
Staff Writer
