Intelligent Mobile Edge Strategy:
The Company Extreme Networks have a new initiative to address the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend and the security threats it brings with it. The initiative includes new Ethernet Switches; a access point and identity management features that are both for wired and wireless technologies.
The Intelligent Mobile Edge Strategy is designed to help IT administrators who are on one-hand trying to protect the network and the data stored on it but also grant access to employees who are using their own mobile devices.
The issue BYOD posses:
David Ginsburg, Extreme’s chief management officer, says that the key issues faced by companies is the continuously growing trend of BYOD is Security and management.
“Organisations are allowing their employees to access the enterprise via personal devices at a rapidly increasing rate,” Ginsburg said in a statement. “This trend has put enterprise mobility on the fast track, yet IT departments are still grappling with how to cope.”
The Intelligent Mobile Edge initiative is designed to provide IT administrators and professionals alike the assistance they need.
As the BYOD trend gains more momentum the number of businesses that are adapting their IT systems to accommodate this is up to 60 percent, according to a report from Avande. Nearly 90 percent of business leaders understand that employees use personal devices for work, 65 percent of C-level executives have acknowledged that BYOD is a high priority for their companies.
“Despite the notion that business leaders are resisting the shift, we found that companies are investing in staff and resources to enable the consumerisation of IT and have many of the resources that are needed today,”
Said Tyson Hartman (Avanade CTO) when they released the report.
Extreme have joined the competition between networking vendor that are looking to offer methods of making the use of employee owned devices on corporate networks. The competition ranges from Juniper Networks all the way through to Cisco systems.
The Intelligent Mobile Edge product range is offering Summit X440 Gigabit fixed switches running ExtremeXOS. These switches include 10 models offering from 8 to 48 ports in a 1U configuration and mix and match stacking to give a more controlled approach to managing switches and identify awareness.
The Wing 5 Architecture
Along with the switches mentioned above, Extreme are also producing a WLAN portfolio know as the WM3000 series of which is based upon the WiNG 5 architecture produced by Motarola.
Extreme, through its Ridgeline management platform, is giving businesses increased identity-aware controls and policy enforcement capability on top of the feature to identify the devices currently connected to the network. The software can apply security and adept resources to new devices and manage key capabilities when influxes of devices are connecting.
Extreme say that the smart identity management capabilities can be applied across LAN, WLAN, 3G and the new 4G network environments providing the ability to actively manage employee devices. Access to the network is based on Active Directory, Radius and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
James Hedges