In the Wireless Age, Your Wired Network Might Be Outdated

Business owners are taking great strides toward freeing themselves from the confines of the office environment once and for all. This means integrating wireless technology into every aspect of the way you handle operations. However, there are still some uses for wired technology that wireless cannot facilitate.

Should your business go completely wireless? Not necessarily; there are some advantages and disadvantages to going wireless, and you should be aware of all of them before rebuilding your infrastructure to facilitate only one of these.

The Case for Wireless
The primary benefit of wireless technology is the lack of wires that might restrict movement of both infrastructure components, and your workers. In this case, you don’t have to run cables all over the office to add new workstations or access points. This eliminates the need for some sort of cable management system, and it essentially makes your network scalable and much easier to manage.

This isn’t to say that wireless technology is perfect. Your wireless connection could be disrupted by something as commonplace as a microwave or other household appliances. Furthermore, it becomes even more necessary that your organization secures any and all access points for the network using some sort of encryption or password protocol. Anyone within range of your WiFi signal can be considered a threat, so it’s important that you take a firm stance on wireless security, especially with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and the Internet of Things (IoT) gaining traction in the work environment.

The Benefits of Wired
While wireless technology is capable of making your business more mobile and flexible, a wired infrastructure is known to increase security and reliability. Since any devices being added to your network must be physically plugged into or connected to your network, you don’t have to worry as much about the odd hacker randomly plugging into your network. Furthermore, a wired network connection isn’t as affected by elements in the environment, like walls, floors, and so on, like a wireless connection would be.

As previously mentioned, wired technology makes for a more complex infrastructure, which makes it much more difficult to add new users and new equipment without carefully considering the cabling procedure. Furthermore, you’re tied down to the location, which means that you’ll need a wireless connection anyway if you want to fully leverage your business’s technology.

Regardless of what kind of infrastructure you decide on, Preferred can help you optimize it to suit the needs of your business. You need to carefully consider how many devices, and for what purposes, will be connecting to your infrastructure. We can help your business maintain or expand your current infrastructure in ways which you can’t even dream of. To learn more, give us a call at 708-781-7110.