Technical nightmare: Handhelds freezing while roaming. How do you keep your handhelds connected when migrating to the cloud?

The annoying problem

A client of mine uses handhelds in their warehouse. The handhelds started to freeze as employees walked around the warehouse. Not being able to work for 5-15 seconds dozens of times a day per employee was costing the customer a lot of money.

Over time the freezing became more frequent and lasted longer. The losses started to pileup. As did the annoyance factor.

Nobody could find it

The freezes occurred as the handhelds roamed from one WiFi access point to another. So the WiFi coverage was measured. And the WiFi network supplier was consulted. And the handheld supplier. No issues where found. Signal strength was OK in the whole warehouse. The WiFi hardware and software was OK and so where the handhelds.

Active directory in the cloud is a hassle

WiFi clients, like the handhelds, authenticate with active directory at this customers site. A few months before the freezes started, our customer had moved their active directory to the cloud. It was tested and worked OK. The few extra milliseconds where not noticed by the users. The AD migration was successful. AD was moved as one of the first services so other cloud services could authenticate.

The saturated Internet connection

After AD, more and more services where moved to the cloud by our customer. All cloud services where accessed from their offices over a VPN that ran on their Internet line. The same Internet line they had been using for years. As more services where migrated to the cloud, the traffic on the Internet line started to pile up. A few months after the cloud migration started, the Internet line became saturated with traffic for 5-15 seconds at a time. A large print job from a cloud service to an office printer. A Teams meeting with 20 users in the same office. You get the picture.

When moving services to the cloud, nobody had thought to analyze the extra traffic this would move from the on premise network to the Internet line, and if that line could handle all that traffic. When a new service was moved, all they did was test the latest moved service. Often in the weekend when the move was done when no employees where using other services. How all moved services worked together on office days was never tested.

The Internet provider

The Internet provider never saw the saturation on the line. They measure 15 minute averages. Peaks lasting 5-15 seconds average out with a 15 minute average. Even a 1 or 2 minute peak would not have shown up. But a 5-15 second freeze slows down users work significantly. And it annoys them, further lowering their productivity.

The long term solution

If you want to use your Internet connection for your cloud connectivity, you need to regulate the traffic. So traffic that impacts your business is prioritized over traffic that’s less urgent. And handhelds and other interactive applications that rely on your Internet line don’t freeze up. Technically that is called Quality of Service (QoS). Think of it as traffic lights and priority lanes.

You should probably also increase available bandwidth, but more bandwidth by itself is not the answer. If that is all you do, the peaks will become shorter, but they won’t disappear altogether.

The short term solution

Upgrading bandwidth and implementing QoS is not something you do overnight. In this case it will take months. So a single WiFi access point was placed in the warehouse, specifically for the handhelds. This prevents them from roaming, fixing the freezing for now.

Although the roaming was not the root cause of the freezes, it was the trigger. Preventing roaming is a workaround that was implemented overnight, fixing the immediate problem and raising productivity quickly.

The big picture when moving to the cloud

In IT we tend to use technical specialists for each technical field. But a cloud migration is a complex technical operation that transcends individual disciplines. Your way of working changes drastically when moving to the cloud and changes have side effects you need to know about, and often mitigate, before you make the change.

Employing or hiring technical knowledge with oversight across disciplines is essential if you want to prevent major issues during and after your cloud migration

You want to avoid turning a technical nightmare into a disruptor of your business operations. Make an appointment here and in 15 minutes you'll know how to keep your network optimized while moving to the cloud.