* Where should you invest? What can wait?
An iffy economy and conservative IT budgets have ushered in the new year. And as 2009 unfolds, wireless has pretty well established itself as the network connectivity medium of choice going forward. With these conditions in mind, where is it wise to invest and where can you hold off on spending?
First, note that there are a lot of expensive legacy devices kicking around, particularly in retail and warehouse environments. Many of these devices have a 7- to 10-year lifecycle, which means they might be around for several years. If you’re prioritizing where to spend your dollars, however, it’s a good idea to put replacement of really old wireless scanners and handsets at the top of the list.
The reason is that many support substandard Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption for security, which has suffered numerous headline-making breaches. If you’re a retailer, note that WEP is actually now forbidden by the latest Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) in new deployments after March 2009. PCI 1.2, which published in October, also requires that WEP be off wireless networks entirely by January 2010 (a year from now), and requires a minimum of Wi-Fi Protected Access security. If you’re upgrading anyway, though, spring for WPA2 if you can get it on the new devices.
Another notion is to plan and upgrade your wireless and wired environments together from this day forward. In the same spirit, create a comprehensive voice strategy that straddles the wired and wireless networks. Depending on whether voice over WLAN is your mainstream internal voice strategy, you’ll construct new WLANs differently.
In other words, WLANs and WANs have grown so pervasive, it’s no longer appropriate to focus on the wired network and consider wireless networks “niches.” Viewing the piece parts of your network, applications and all, as one big environment is helpful as you look ahead so that speeds, feeds and software in all network segments will be adequate to support other network segments as they, too, change.
For example, another domino-type question: Will you use wireless mesh? If yes, you can bypass investments in some edge Ethernet switch ports. If no, but you do plan to deploy 802.11n, begin moving edge Ethernet switches to gigabit port speeds as they need replacing. As old things die, replace them in context of the big picture – with adequate speed, power and software versioning to support the connections that feed into them.
