Employee are now unchained from their desks; mobility frees the ability to work anyplace, anytime, and from any device. This is revolutionizing the type of productivity and efficiency businesses see from their workforce- large, medium, or small.  While realizing business efficiency and growth, midmarket IT is struggling to balance objectives (make the network for you) and challenges (limited resources).

Midmarket IT Objectives

Leverage the network as a strategic asset

To increase employee productivity and gain competitive advantage;

Better serving customers,

Thus realizing overall growth

Midmarket IT Challenges with Mobility and BYOD

The advent of mobility and BYOD, while unleashing unprecedented levels of communication and collaboration, brings challenges to IT. Mobility enables BYOD. BYOD enablesmultipletypes of employees, logging in frommultipletypes of devices, frommultiplelocations. Users are demanding access to the Internet and applications wherever and whenever they want.  Chaos? Anyone reading this won't need the laundry list of concerns. It's there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kOtYC-a0rM

Midmarket IT Solutions: What to Consider

With limited IT staff wearing multiple hats, midmarket IT value a consolidated network infrastructure. At the basic level, midmarket IT need the ability to have a single bird's eye view of the entire network infrastructure (wired, wireless, and VPN) and manage its performance-One Management. Midmarket IT also need to have a single policy enforcement system that spans the entire network ensuring information security-One Policy.

Besides simplifying the management and security of the wired/wireless network with convergence, you must consider which direction the IT department plans to embrace:

• A comprehensive, converged wired/wireless network that supports advanced features and dynamic policy or service roll-outs. If your IT department includes technical experts that can really make the network work hard to differentiate the business, seeCisco's Unified Access BYOD Smart Solution: One Network, One Policy, One Management.
• An easy-to-use wired/wireless network, with  effortless cloud-based management, where the business network is simple, reliable, and secure yet allowing lean-IT to focus on business relevance as well as network operations, see theCisco Meraki (Cloud Managed) Smart Solution

While BYODdoesbring chaos to many IT organizations itcanbe constrained and leveraged with Cisco's One Network, One Policy, One Management approach. It can enable IT to spend less time running the network and more time encouraging innovation that can differentiate and transform business. It allows organizations to empower their users to work their way.

• One Network is the convergence of the wired and wireless networks into one physical infrastructure with greater network-wide intelligence, performance, and integration. IT can move away from running two disparate networks- wired and wireless- towards a converged wired and wireless network ready to leverage the opportunities provided by mobility and BYOD. IT can more easily scale to meet new BYOD and cloud demands with faster, consolidated service roll-outs and efficient change management. Promote greater business efficiency -Simplify and converge infrastructure with across-the-network consistency.
• One Policy provides context-based central policy that spans across the entire network (wired, wireless, or VPN). It simplifies the design and implementation of security policies with system-wide visibility into who and what is on the network. Midmarket IT can secure access regardless of network access medium or device; the onslaught of BYOD becomes secure BYOD.
• One Management provides comprehensive lifecycle management, performance assurance, and compliance for converged wired and wireless networks, simplifying network management across wired and wireless. Midmarket IT maintains a birds-view, comprehensive view of how the network is performing, where performance can be impacted, and proactively minimize business disruption. Granular visibility into applications, users, and devices helps improve end-user experience and productivity.

Check out the latest Cisco IT Brief featuring Gartner research and focusing on the midmarket network infrastructure to learn more.  http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/newsletters/cisco_v6/issue1/index.html

Gartner recently released their Magic Quadrant on the wired and wireless infrastructure. Check out the results! http://blogs.cisco.com/wireless/cisco-leads-the-gartner-wired-and-wireless-lan-infrastructure-magic-quadrant-again/