The Value of Integrating Applications in the Network

Businesses today demand more from their networks than ever before. Networks today now need to support all forms of media—including data, voice, and video—to enhance business communications and lower operating costs. Access has also changed, as thousands of new devices connect to the network via wireless and wired connections.

To solve these pressing challenges, organizations need their networks to contain intelligence and play an active role in securely integrating applications in a way that is easy to manage. Intelligent networks integrate many advanced applications into an adaptable, pervasive, and collaborative system.

Integrated Security: In today's environment , a mix of point-product solutions is no longer sufficient protection. Network security must be pervasive and integrated into the fabric of the network infrastructure itself. The network becomes the main point of control for preventing and responding to security threats from internal and external sources. An integrated strategy includes multiple types of protection and dramatically improves the ability of networks to identify, prevent, and adapt to security threats. Such systems help to ensure information privacy, protect against threats, and control access to corporate resources.

IP Communications: Voice, video, and other types of data are woven into a converged network. IP Communications—which includes IP telephony as well as unified messaging and voicemail; customer contact applications; and audio, Web, and rich-media conferencing tools—demonstrates the power of an intelligent network. Tight integration into the infrastructure means that each new application—video, Web, or telephony—is just another media type rather than an entirely different communications system. The applications themselves can intelligently communicate with the infrastructure to meet the constantly changing needs of the system.

Wireless: Wireless cannot be viewed as an isolated application, especially when wireless access points scale into the hundreds or thousands. An intelligent network provides the framework that enables a wireless LAN solution to take full advantage of existing tools, knowledge, and resources of the wired infrastructure to address critical wireless LAN security, deployment, and control issues.

IP-based voice, wireless, and security are only the first in a new wave of advanced applications that are beginning to powerfully change the ways in which businesses operate. Organizations must consider how they can best enable their networks today so that their companies can continuously take advantage of new applications quickly, secure them easily, and manage them efficiently in pursuit of their business goals.