Commence the Growth: Wireless Technologies

This month we have been researching and discussing the latest and greatest innovations and deciding how to apply them to your business model.  In today’s industry there are two innovations that have established themselves and have most emphatically changed the business landscape: smartphones and tablets.  These are items that a business must use and put into practice in order to compete with their current competition. There are two approaches you need to think about when looking at mobile technology: innovation and security. 

First, let’s look at how to be innovative.  This is the fun part and how you will get a leg up on your competition.  Have a fun, energetic, out of the box meeting with your department heads.  Brainstorm on how a wireless device could be inserted into every stage of your business activities and strategize the potential impact it could have on your internal processes.  Don’t just stop at tablets and phones, think about wireless barcode scanners, laptops, wireless access points, etc.  Where do you think you would like signal?  What programs would it be great to interact with while you are with a client, or on the shop floor?  What would speed up your workers if they didn’t have to go back to a computer to complete a task?  Toss it all out there and then rank the ideas using a matrix to determine the return on implementing this investment.  Decide how expensive it would be to implement and the potential impact it could have on your bottom line.  Look for overlap, where instituting a technology enables multiple departments to enhance their processes.

Now the fun part is over, it’s time to get serious about security.  BYOD and COPE and encrypted signals are your first concerns.  Bring your own device (BYOD) and company owned, personally enabled (COPE) policies will be your first decision because it guides the rest of the security policies you will need to explore.  If you choose a BYOD policy, you don’t have to buy any wireless devices because your employees bring their own.  But, now they have access to your network from their phone and so does all of the viruses they bring with them.  And, if they leave your employment, it’s best to make sure you have the means to deactivate their access and recover any their downloads.  Company owned means you will have to purchase the devices yourself, but you can put whatever policy you want on it to keep your network safe and simply request the employee to turn it in, should they wish to leave your employment.  Your signal to these devices needs to be encrypted and stable.  Traffic needs to be monitored for potential Trojans, Viruses, and Worms.  Whitelist and Blacklist websites that are known to carry these threats at your firewall and allow the sites the employee needs to enter your bandwidth.  Encrypt the signal to your devices and make sure the signal broadcast is as stable as possible.

I can help you monitor and manage those too!  We are developing a whole new service to help you strategize their use and add them to your managed service plan.  If this is something you want to do, just give me a call and let’s put our heads together.