Guardian

WITH the discovery by Cisco that organisations in Nigeria are currently saddled with the challenge of managing the growth of mobile devices and business applications across multiple networks, it has stressed the need for a robust unified access solution.

According to Cisco, a global IT infrastructure provider, majority of the businesses are finding it difficult to address issues that are enabling innovation and agility, adding that it’s discovered also that the role of wireless and wired networks is growing and network operations and feature requirements are becoming more complex.

According to the company’s data forecast tagged Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2012 to 2017, in Middle East and Africa, Cisco noted that mobile data traffic will grow 17-fold from 2012 to 2017, representing a compound yearly growth rate of 77 per cent.

Relying on this statistic, the firm introduced new solutions under the Cisco Unified Access umbrella that simplify network design by converging wired and wireless networks.

The products include Catalyst 3850 Unified Access Switch, with built-in wireless LAN (WLAN) controller functionality. Another is Cisco 5760 Unified Access WLAN Controller appliance featuring IOS-based software and 60Gbps performance

Cisco said these new enhancements to Cisco Unified Access will allow IT organisations in Nigeria to rapidly manage changing network demands and greater services innovations.

According to Cisco’s Head of Architectures and Enterprise, Emerging Markets, Mr. Den Sullivan, “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. 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.