Latin America. Rubén Sánchez, LATAM Regional Director, Extreme Networks, recently announced the official date of the seventh edition of Buen Fin 2017, from November 17 to 20, in which multiple companies provide attractive offers to attract more buyers. The reality is that this event has become the beginning of the Christmas shopping season and with it, the pressure for an excellent operation in business increases.
A key piece of this entire business landscape is the wireless network. With increased mobility, that's where most devices are connected. And not only store devices, such as barcode terminals and printers, but also users who increasingly use their smartphones while making their purchases.
By offering possibilities such as in-store navigation through an app, personalized advertising, and coupons, along with expert assistance, retailers provide a better experience to shoppers using their personal smartphones. Today, a flawless wireless network is necessary to carry out these actions.
So what does all this mean? The key is that your wireless network must cope with the high demand for speed and capacity. In addition, it must offer the same performance, in terms of reliability and security, as a wired network. There is another aspect to consider. Many of the IT areas of companies face the same pressures, but have less time and budget. Therefore, the wireless connection should be easy and cost-effective to implement, control, monitor and execute.
Here are five important steps to ensure your Wi-Fi networks deliver the reliability and performance your users demand.
1. Optimize security
If not handled securely, Wi-Fi can become an Achilles' heel. You can mitigate threats with a network that offers government-grade security protection. Some networks also help IT teams integrate legal and security requirements into day-to-day workflows (i.e., automated security audits and testing to validate compliance with payment card industry data management standards). We also recommend installing systems that provide a variety of options for validating users. This includes making it easier for IT teams to certify and for onboard employee devices to be authorized to connect to the corporate network. It's important to make sure you can easily comply with legal requirements on guest access with the ability to capture mobile numbers to send them codes to validate their details when they log in.
2. View and control applications
It's helpful to have remote monitoring tools that tell you what's running on your network and allow you to prioritize traffic. For example, you might want to make sure that app traffic takes precedence between, say, 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., before Facebook requests and general Web searches. The best monitoring systems use deep packet inspection engines, integrated into management software and wireless access points, to allow traffic monitoring. You can then use rule-based firewalls to filter or limit non-priority traffic.
3. Centralize incident resolution
When you have access to tools that can remotely diagnose network problems quickly from the central IT desk, you no longer need IT staff at every store. These tools provide the ability to remotely reset, adjust, and change the settings of any remote access point. Proactive troubleshooting tools can test the end-to-end connection between the client and the application server, before users arrive in the morning. You can also configure the system to provide alerts to your team when they are needed to intervene and resolve an issue. Of all the improvements to Wi-Fi in recent years, this feature offers the greatest potential to save costs by resolving incidents without the need for an on-site engineer.
4. Automate management
Your network should be able to self-manage with access points that take steps to fix issues such as interference, overloading access points, or device failure. The network can automate changes to overcome these issues, switching between frequency channels, increasing power, and rebalancing loads at access points. You can define the rules for network self-management to avoid incidents and greatly reduce the administrative burden on your team.
5. See everything anywhere
According to administrators, the most worrying thing is not seeing what is happening on your network. There's nothing worse than an avalanche of unexpected help desk calls. We've focused on this area in our latest Wi-Fi management tools to provide constant information about network health. This visibility provides a wealth of real-time data from the status of individual access points, to loads, to a view of which applications are running, the number and types of devices connecting to the network.
In conclusion, in the past, a lot of manual effort was required to ensure that users receive good Wi-Fi performance. New management tools have now simplified network installation, monitoring, management, and troubleshooting. Wi-Fi is becoming a real requirement for users. Add faster speeds and easier installation of 802.11ac Wave 2 access points that meet users' growing capacity demands, and get you ready for the busiest business months of the year.
