Peer to Peer Magazine

CASE STUDIES More Wi-Fi, Less Hardware: Taking It to the Cloud by Brian Clayton, Director of Information Systems at Taft, Stettinius & Hollister LLP O ver the past couple of years, I've seen firsthand how the demand for greater mobility and access has grown. As is the case with other law firms, when mobile devices like iPads hit our offices, we were forced to respond — with a comprehensive wireless solution, appropriate security controls, proactive traffic management, etc. Attorneys started requesting Wi-Fi access either for client meetings or for office-to-office mobility with laptops. Our IT team always responded with a solution — first with individual consumer-grade access points and eventually with controller-managed access points in conference room areas. But soon we had an issue of ad hoc Wi-Fi sprawl. Different brands of access points all programmed in different ways — it was totally unmanageable. Meanwhile, the requests for Wi-Fi increased as our attorneys purchased iPads and adopted a "bring your own device" mentality. For years we'd been encouraging our users toward greater adoption of technology, and now we either had to allow it or fight it. It was clear that mobile devices weren't going away and that we had to get in front of this trend. We chose the "don't fight it, perfect it" approach. THE NEED: WI-FI EVERYWHERE, doing on it, and I was concerned about my users adding their own rogue access points to the network. At the same time, all of our offices were demanding Wi-Fi with seamless roaming officewide. The introduction of the iPhone and the iPad created a stampede of users who wanted wireless access everywhere, all the time. Our attorneys started out using Exchange on their devices, then they were saving files on Dropbox, and then they were using Skype to speak with their kids across the network and asking for a user-friendly version of Citrix for smaller screens. I recognized that we had migrated to an environment in "With a few mouse clicks, we secured our network." ALL THE TIME When I transitioned from Technical Operations Manager to Director of Information Systems at Taft in early 2011, the Wi- Fi network had become unruly. We had outgrown our Cisco wireless controller, meaning that adding access points also meant buying a new $10,000 controller. In addition, we were dependent on a Cisco engineer for configuration changes, which often took too long to schedule and complete. I had no idea who was on the wireless network or what they were 32 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer which consumer devices were being used for business applications, so an officewide Wi-Fi deployment made sense. But it was very important to me to find a solution that was secure, truly scalable, iPad-ready and easy for us to manage without an outside engineer. THE SOLUTION: TAKING WIRELESS TO THE CLOUD With these requirements in mind, one of our technology consultants recommended an innovative WLAN solution: Meraki cloud-managed Wi-Fi. This system's access points

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