Application Control from Xirrus Bringing Back Control to IT Departments

November 19, 2012
By: Jamie Epstein

With mobility now required by employees in every industry, it is vital that as you move mission-critical applications to wireless networks and increasingly rely on wireless, you must be more intelligent in how you control that data.

Now add in potential cyber attacks with the increasing pressure brought by the BYOD and conzumerization of network trends, and you’ll quickly realize you need a tool which can ramp up visibility into every application occuring within your corporate infrastructure.

Luckily, that’s exactly what Xirrus’ Application Control solution can do, in addition to offering IT a much deeper layer of intelligence, prioritizing available bandwidth, assigning bandwidths according to rules set by IT, and enforcing policies – all before any traffic is admitted to the network core. 

Founded back in 2004 and headquartered in Sherwood Oaks, CA (News - Alert), Xirrus is heavily focused on high-performance wireless solutions and realizes the vitality of Wi-Fi, whether it’s in a school, enterprise or hospital.

These days, wireless is everywhere, and the performance problem of getting a good connection is a pretty ubiquitous issue these days.

By implementing the company’s latest offering, your organization will gain access to much more than just wireless plumbing, but rather a network that makes sure you will remain secure while simultaneously generating revenue. With Application Control in place, IT managers now have the upper hand on control and can see exactly what type and kind of devices are being connected and what actions they are performing.

While there are a number of vendors out there currently who make application gateways which look at and allow control over the network, there are major obstacles that continue to arise including choke points, where too much traffic is being fed into one place – a single point of failure that if it goes down must have a high level of resiliency bake in; and it doesn’t scale too well. 

In an exclusive interview with TMCnet, Bruce Miller (News - Alert), vice president of Product Marketing, Xirrus told me, “What we do instead of relying on a central resource from a third party is put the application control directly into the array. Not only can the user fully control various applications, they can even block certain traffic right from the edge as opposed to allowing traffic to go all the way through the network. When performing this action at the edge of the network, it is much more scalable, protects resources more readily and simply makes a lot more sense to smooth things out and get control over doing things.”

Additionally, the robust product can pinpoint small problems before they become major issues, which in turn yields a slowdown in connection speeds. It also detects when things change, and can quickly figure out what’s happening and why.

As companies continue to transition to cloud-based services, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)), and ultimately rely on the network all the way through to complete important projects,  efficiently managing all different kinds of actions using best-in-breed technology to identify applications is incredibly important.




Edited by Braden Becker


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