The building blocks of a mobile/wireless strategy

Computerworld - Your employees are more productive and are able to work in a more flexible environment, with key corporate information at their fingertips. The warehouse workers receive incoming shipments from suppliers using wireless PDAs, and your inventory system and other key business systems are instantly up to date. Mobile delivery personnel keep store shelves perfectly stocked using accurate routing and delivery information loaded on their wireless handhelds each morning and throughout the day. And retail clerks using the latest line-busting technology effortlessly sell your products to happy customers, who no longer have to stand in checkout lines.
At headquarters, your network operations center runs smoothly with no wireless network outages. Last year's embarrassing attack on your wireless network is a distant memory, and the hackers are no longer a threat. Your CEO has the company's key performance indicators available on her wireless PDA from any conference room, thanks to your foresight to wirelessly enable the executive offices. You have increased productivity and reduced costs, and you're in line for a big promotion.
Then, you wake up.

The Perfect World ...
In a perfect world, wireless LANs consistently deliver the high bandwidth required for the mission-critical applications you use to run your business. There is no threat of service interruption and therefore no loss of data. Users operate in a more flexible environment, transparently roaming from one WLAN access point to another with no loss of connectivity. The threat of hackers is nonexistent, every application is a bandwidth-friendly thin client, and employees never lose, drop or generally abuse their mobile assets. In a perfect world, the effort to manage wireless devices and the applications that run on them is no more difficult than managing your corporate desktop systems. But wireless LANs are far from perfect.

The reality of today's mobile world
For many businesses, managing wireless devices and designing applications for a WLAN environment is a significant challenge that must be addressed to gain the full advantage of this promising technology. In the real world, a successful mobile deployment involves much more than placing the latest and greatest wireless device in your employees' hands. Specifically, organizations must create thoughtful strategies to manage their mobile bandwidth, applications, devices and security. Even in the seemingly always-connected world, you still have issues that need to be addressed with management technology. While 802.11 sounds good and is good, you must operate within certain parameters. These restrictions are real and must be addressed for the real-time enterprise to exist as envisioned.

Bandwidth
With 11Mbit/sec. of 802.11b bandwidth,