• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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BusinessDay

Cisco raises bar in enterprise networking

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Organisations in Nigeria are struggling with the ever-growing challenge of managing the growth of mobile devices and business applications across multiple networks. In view of this, United States technology company, Cisco is assisting business simplify network operation issues with the launch of a new solution under the Cisco Unified Access™ umbrella which converges wired and wireless networks. With the increasing need to connect more people, data, processes and things to the network, the role of wireless and wired networks, according to the technology company is growing as network operations and feature requirements become more complex.

According to the Cisco® Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2012 to 2017, in Middle East and Africa, mobile data traffic will grow 17-fold from 2012 to 2017, a compound annual growth rate of 77 percent. The company is announcing the new Cisco Catalyst 3850 Unified Access Switch with built-in wireless LAN (WLAN) controller functionality. It is also introducing the Cisco 5760 Unified Access WLAN Controller appliance featuring IOS-based software and 60Gbps performance. These new enhancements to Cisco Unified Access, according to the company, will allow IT organisation in Nigeria to rapidly manage changing network demands and greater services innovations.

Speaking at a press conference in Lagos, weekend, Den Sullivan, head of Architectures and Enterprise, Emerging Markets, said, “Our customers in Nigeria are looking for a simple, highly secure network with reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) that allows them to address the demands that new access requirements such as BYOD and new innovative line of business applications bring.” He further added that Cisco Unified Access allows customers to achieve these goals by moving away from individual vertical stacks of technology and disparate components and creating a single architecture for an intelligent network.

Cisco Unified Access is Cisco’s strategy to unify wired, wireless and virtual private networks (VPNs), into a single, highly secure network infrastructure based on one policy source and one management solution for the entire campus network. The new Unified Access products deliver consistent simplicity and intelligence across the entire network, enabling IT organisation to shift the focus away from time-consuming operational activities to those that enable innovative smart /business processes.

Cisco Unified Access also includes features such as software-defined networking (SDN) open interfaces, which offer greater investment protection through support of new features in the future. Previously, wireless networks have been built as overlays to the wired network, resulting in two logical networks to manage, and in increased complexity. These problems have been increased as users have brought multiple devices onto the network, leading to difficulty within IT of implementing common access policies, enabling BYOD, securing the network and providing an uncompromised experience.

 

Stories by BEN UZOR JR