How to avoid BYOD bandwidth woes

While nobody is predicting that the proliferation of mobile devices in the enterprise will create a full-blown bandwidth catastrophe, IT managers will have to move quickly to ensure satisfactory performance for employees accessing company data over wireless links.

The biggest issue is ensuring that data is available when users want it, and that wireless connections are secure and reliable. While this is also true for wired networks, mobile computing poses an additional burden on IT.

"Mobile computing offers a unique challenge. We can't predict where users are going to be, and we have to be prepared to support users anywhere, all the time," says John Edgar, vice president of information technology at the U.S. Postal Service.