ANS Group Plc: Solutions - Wireless Solutions

Wireless Solutions

Mobility Solutions: Your Business Moves With You

Efficient, fast, live. Cisco Mobility Solutions deliver secure connections, rich experiences, and intelligent services to help your organisation.

Improve the efficiency of employees and enhance the experiences of customers and partners
Collaborate in real-time using your choice of tools: application access, voice, video, instant messaging, or e-mail
Maintain security and access policies for devices and networks
Redefine business processes with voice, guest, location, security, and other mobility services
Track assets in real time
Turn an entire city into a hotspot, allowing city workers and citizens to do their jobs anywhere

Conduct Business Anywhere, Anytime

Mobility solutions let your employees conduct business anywhere, anytime, from any device delivering three key capabilities to the organisation: insight, collaboration, and awareness. The technology underpinning mobility spans the spectrum of network capabilities: wired and wireless IP networks, unified communications, and location tracking solutions, each of which has integral security capabilities to protect both the device and the enterprise network.

Insight

Insight is the ability for employees to make accurate information-based decisions, complete business processes no matter where they may be, and meet customer needs on a timely basis. It is more than access to e-mail and other collaboration tools; it is the key information imbued with the timeliness and context needed to meet revenue goals, improve customer satisfaction, and interact with partners.

The technologies that support insight include:

Both wired and wireless IP networking technologies that link the user to the corporate network to access applications and data
Devices customised for the individual job role and environment, including laptops, tablets, ruggedized computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), smart phones, mobile phones, and wireless IP phones
Security solutions to protect the device, data, and corporate network, including VPN, antivirus, firewall, network admission control (NAC) appliance, and intrusion detection and prevention solutions
Cisco and third-party applications that use network intelligence, including presence, location, identity, time of day, network type, and device type, to create contextually aware information delivery

Collaboration

Collaboration is more than simply trying to reach a colleague, partner, or customer by phone, e-mail, IM, or text message. Effective collaboration means reaching the person, not the device, quickly and simply in order to speed communication and decision making.

The technologies that support collaboration include:

Unified Communications solutions extended to mobile solutions, including smart phones or wireless IP phones, as well as to desktop IP phones and single-business-number-reach services
Applications such as e-mail, voicemail, instant messaging, or text messaging
Presence capabilities to understand who is available and whether they wish to be reached by phone, e-mail, IM, or text message
Audio- and video-conferencing capabilities that allow users to share documents

Awareness

Awareness enables visibility into the key assets and people that are needed to complete work processes and meet customer commitments. Connecting these valuable assets into the network clarifies their location and status, reduces search time and procurement costs, and improves customer and employee satisfaction.

The technologies that support awareness include:

Wireless LANs that allow the tracking of mobile devices and people throughout a building
Active and passive RF identification (RFID) tags that report the movement of assets and the condition of the item, including temperature, humidity, vibration, and availability
Location appliances that track usage, location, movement, and trends

Business Benefits

Enhance Productivity, Collaboration, and Responsiveness

Increasing globalisation, flat budgets, and growing customer demand for immediacy are driving organisations to use mobility as a way to gain business advantage. Mobility solutions can increase the top line and help keep costs in control, helping to enable:

Increased customer responsiveness
Faster reaction to market events
Competitive edge through real-time data access

Wireless networks are a key component of a mobility solution, helping to transform downtime into productive time inside the enterprise.

Wireless networks enable real-time access to people, applications, and network resources across campuses, branch offices, and remote locations. Service providers recognize the demand and are offering new, innovative wireless services. As high-speed municipal networks and public hot zones expand, the same rich enterprise application experience will be available to mobile workers, whether they're on transportation systems or in cafés, restaurants, and hotels and around a metro area.

Organisations in a wide range of industries can benefit from providing wireless connectivity:

Education:

Wireless networks allow schools at all levels to provide a wide range of applications across their facilities without expensive rewiring, giving students and staff access to benefits, such as e-learning, voice communications, and high-bandwidth Internet access, to enhance learning, improve administration, and enhance research efforts.

Financial Services:

Financial services firms can provide employees with mobility, giving them instant access to industry trends, customer data, and financial information, helping firms dramatically improve customer service and more quickly deliver products and services.

Government:

Public-safety and law-enforcement agencies can have uninterrupted access to crucial information, helping them respond more quickly and efficiently to a crisis or day-to-day operations.

Healthcare:

Caregivers can access real-time patient information or medical research from the patient bedside to make more accurate decisions more quickly and continue providing quality healthcare.

Manufacturing:

Wireless access to the networked supply-chain is helping manufacturers allow employees to share real-time data on the factory floor and support timely assembly.

Retail:

Wireless networks help retailers improve store staff flexibility and efficiency, check out customers faster, and give customers access to relevant promotions, product information, and online ordering.

Transportation:

Airlines, railroads, commercial trucking firms, and other businesses are using wireless networks to make their workforces more mobile. Wireless LANs improve efficiency of cargo handling, warehousing, and shipping through automation, which improves customer service and enhances security.

Wireless for Enterprise: Connect Anytime, Anywhere

Maintain your competitive advantage through the freedom and flexibility of a Cisco Unified Wireless Network. This secure, scalable, cost-effective WLAN solution offers:

Anytime, anywhere access to information, which promotes collaboration with colleagues, business partners, and customers
Real-time access to instant messaging, e-mail, and network resources, which boosts productivity and speeds business decision making
Mobility services, such as voice, guest access, advanced security, and location, that help you transform business operations

The Cisco Unified Wireless Network is the only unified wired and wireless solution to cost-effectively address the WLAN security, deployment, management, and control issues that your enterprise faces. It combines the best elements of wireless and wired networking to deliver secure, scalable WLANs with a low total cost of ownership.

The Cisco Unified Wireless Network includes:

Location Solution - Monitor and optimize business processes through real-time Wi-Fi device tracking to deliver location-based security, high-value asset tracking, and business policy enforcement.
Wireless Network Security - Advanced security and intrusion prevention helps ensure that data will remain private and secure and that the network will be protected from unauthorised access.
Voice-Ready Wireless - Enhance productivity and improve communications using voice over the WLAN.
RF Solutions - Spectrum analysis can help detect and eliminate sources of RF interference in wireless networks.

Cisco Outdoor Wireless: Cost-effective, Scalable, and Secure Outdoor Connectivity

Cisco Outdoor Wireless Network Solutions use wireless mesh technology, wireless bridging and mobile networks to allow government, public safety, and transportation organization to build cost-effective outdoor wireless networks for private or public use. These technologies are designed to provide secure, high-bandwidth, and scalable solutions to enable access to fixed and mobile applications across metropolitan areas.

Outdoor Wireless Benefits Communities

The wireless network solutions benefit communities in a variety of ways, including:

Enhancing the ability of public-safety organizations to protects citizens everywhere
Promotes field productivity, leading to more responsive and collaborative services
Informs and increases the speed of decision making and situational awareness
Improves climate for economic development and tourism

This solution allows municipalities to extend their existing wired networked services and applications beyond their current physical infrastructures, offering innovative new ways to accelerate communications and service delivery to both employees and citizens. Wireless mesh technology:

Enables flexible, mobile, and dynamic communications
Eases deployment and the ability to deploy network devices where running fiber is cost-prohibitive
Simplifies addition of networked devices
Integrates with existing network technology
Offers superior security across the entire network

Cisco Outdoor Wireless Solutions comprise a portfolio of products designed to enable deployment of a wireless mesh network infrastructure, wireless bridging, and mobile networks. This solution is designed to meet the specific needs of local governments, public safety, transportation, and the oil and the gas industry.

Related Case Studies:

Cheshire and Wirral Remote Access Solution

Bradford and Airedale Remote Access Solution