Due to the increase in the amount of mobile devices that are now being used by so many individuals in a corporate or enterprise environment, it has become increasingly difficult to manage wired and wireless networks. Today, Cisco Systems (News - Alert) is unveiling a unified networking solution. It is designed to bring all wired, wireless and private networks under a single policy and management umbrella. It is aimed at helping enterprises deal with the rapid growth of traffic on their networks. Cisco’s goal is to resolve the issues that can arise from the bring your own device (BYOD) trend that is now seems to be prevalent in most companies.

Cisco wants to help make wireless more manageable within a corporate environment. A modest estimate is that in the coming year about 90 percent of organizations will allow employees to use their own personal devices for work use.  Over the past couple of months, Cisco Systems has introduced a couple of solutions that are aimed at helping IT departments deal with employee’s personal devices and their interaction to the corporate network.

Cisco’s vice president of product marketing, Chris Spain said, “BYOD has been big change in market but also a way for Cisco to expand how its wireless offerings work and provide a lot of integration between its wired and wireless offerings.”

Cisco will unveil a fundamental change in enterprise networking. It is offering new unified access products that are designed to bring wired and wireless infrastructures together to build simple, secure and open networks. In the past, wired and wireless networks have been two distinct and separate networks. Both needed to be managed and made secure to be of any use to the company. These problems have been compounded as users have brought multiple devices onto the network, leading to difficulties within IT departments to implement any kind of common access policies that would enable BYODs while still keeping the network secure and providing an uncompromised experience.

Having managed quite a few IT departments myself, I know how difficult it is just to maintain and secure the internal wired network. According to Cisco, what makes this work is that the Cisco Unified Access network architecture converges processing of wired and wireless traffic into a single data plane. Based on the new Cisco Unified Access Data Plane (UADP) ASIC, it terminates wired and wireless traffic, provides high performance and scale, and enables consistent services to be applied to both wired and wireless networks, simplifying life for network administrators. The UADP ASIC features a programmable data plane, enabling deployment of software defined networking services.

Cisco today announced two new Cisco Unified Access networking products featuring the UADP ASIC:

• New Cisco Catalyst 3850 Unified Access Switch with built-in wireless LAN (WLAN) controller functionality. It delivers one physical infrastructure for wired and wireless networks. The Catalyst 3850 Switch offers integrated wired and wireless LAN controller functionality. It also supports common and consistent network intelligence, with network-wide visibility and analytics for faster troubleshooting, and granular hierarchical quality of service across the entire wired-wireless infrastructure. This common and consistent intelligence is based on the use of one IOS and one wired-wireless ASIC – the new Unified Access Data Plane (UADP) ASIC.
• New Cisco 5760 Unified Access WLAN Controller appliance featuring IOS-based software and 60Gbps performance. Utilizing the Cisco UADP ASIC, the 5760 delivers 60Gbps of capacity with hierarchical QoS capabilities for a centralized deployment.

Additionally, Cisco announced new versions of the Cisco Unified Access policy and management solutions:

• New Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) 1.2
• New Cisco Prime Infrastructure 2.0

We all know that there is an increasing need to connect more people, data, processes and things in general to the network. The role of wireless and wired networks is converging and network operations and feature requirements are becoming more complex. These new enhancements to Cisco Unified Access allow IT organizations to rapidly manage changing network demands.

To find out more about Roberto D. De La Mora, Sr. Director, Unified Communications (News - Alert) and Cisco, visit the company at ITEXPO Miami 2013, taking place Jan. 29- Feb 1, in Miami, Florida. Roberto D. De La Mora is speaking during “ Making UC and Collaboration More Business Relevant to Individual Users For more information on ITEXPO Miami 2013 click here.