About the Author
Craig J. Mathias is a principal with Farpoint Group, an advisory firm specializing in wireless networking and mobile computing.
Full bioOne of the most interesting aspects of having participated in wireless and mobile for almost (gulp!) 25 years is in appreciating just howculturalwireless has become. By that I mean how wireless is today very much like air or water or electricity – it's justthere, quietly and efficiently filling a need that we just couldn't live without. We used to describe wireless in terms ofanytimeandanywhere, and that's indeed the reality we have today.
And one of those very important anytimes and anywheres is in distributed and branch settings, where wireless LANs are (no surprise here) once again essential. Wiringanylocation can be a pain, but with contemporary mobile devices losing much of their inherent value without being completely wireless (and most lacking, regardless, any way to connect to a wired LAN), wireless access has become essential in finance, healthcare, retail, education, and, well,everyother distributed setting.
They key challenge to IT managers today, however, has little to do with airwaves and access points – rather, enabling the broad array of functionality required in branch settings has traditionally involved an awful lot of moving parts. Think about all of what's traditionally been required here – routers, switches, wireless-LAN controllers, firewalls, local servers, management servers or appliances (and a local console), local storage, and often much more. Sure, networking benefits from standards and interoperability, but think about the capital cost, system-integration expense, having to deal with multiple management consoles, ongoing maintenance, and well, you get the picture. Distributed and branch operations are today essential, but they can also be expensive – and evenvery expensive, and that from the perspective of both capital and operating expense. Minimizing total cost of ownership, then, can be really difficult, and the opportunity for errors across the board – from misconfigurations to outright security holes – can be a serious resource-devouring pit.
Fortunately, a very powerful opportunity, which we believe will in fact will become an outrighttrend在接下来的几年里，现在已经出现了：consolidationof almost all of the functionality required in the field into asingle, high-function, cost-effectiveunit that is often called abranch controller。是的，它仍然是无线局域网控制器。但它从其他两种关键趋势中获益，即IT经理令人兴奋的趋势：以太网用于广域连接和基于云的业务应用程序。由于任何住宅网络用户今天知道，以太网WAN速度快捷 - 并且在大多数地区都可以使用。所以 - 无需更昂贵的路由器，简化操作和较低的经营成本在讨价还价中。
Even more important is taking advantage of the broad range of IT services that are moving into the Cloud. No more requirements for local servers and storage, local operations staff, and, really, on-siteanything。We expect even more IT functionality to move into the Cloud over time, but we today already have a few notable and valuable benefits in place: consolidated functionality, security, manageability, and cost control. All that's required are a few access points, perhaps a few Ethernet ports for any legacy equipment still in use, and a space to put a small number of components – often just the branch controller itself. And, as they say, that's that -you're done!
我们即将到来的网络研讨会将进入此处的所有细节，但您已获得IT的主旨：思考综合功能，优化基于云的服务，集中控制，最后，以最小化总成本的方式所有权比以往更少的工作。我记得分布式计算的早期 - 缓慢，复杂的通信，更多的盒子可以计算，很多软件和集成问题，以及可能卷曲你的头发的成本。非常欢迎分发并分支that just works– and weekends that are truly yours.
