Identifying & Tracking | Mist & Kontakt.io

As offices and sites reopen to employees, many businesses that I’ve talked to are at least considering general office and visitor safety for their operations, but they often express concerns about how to do so in a way that’s effective, legal and affordable. Speed and precision is paramount for guest management and here’s how Mist and their partner, Kontakt.io, are able to help.

Demystifying Contact Tracing 

Contact tracing is a line of defense against further COVID-19 outbreaks. An effective system needs to:

• Provide relevant and timely data to identify, trace staff and visitors
• Accurately track how individuals or objects come into contact with each other
• Easily embed into existing business operations

However, most existing office and guest management solutions struggle to accomplish these three goals. Some businesses still have time and resource consuming processes in place.

A better way to manage your environment

Juniper’s Mist access points and cloud services offer a compelling solution. By using a combination of AI analytics, Wi-Fi, and patented virtual Bluetooth® LE (vBLE), the network can provide accurate location data through signals from devices, personnel tags and equipment. Mist’s microservices cloud architecture makes this possible, giving it the capacity to capture and process far greater amounts of data than traditional on-premise network analytics solutions.

Combining Mist with wearable devices like Kontakt.io’s lanyards and smart badges enables businesses to:

• Map movements of all employees, devices and assets, giving administrators a visual report of an individual’s movement, number of locations visited and time spent at each place
• Trace and determine proximity through device ID by tracking device IDs and cross-mapping them to a location in a building, campus or warehouse
• Take preventive action with Hot Zone Alerts that detect increases of foot traffic or congestion in specific areas, and alert managers or automatically divert those in the area with push notifications. 

For enterprise clients, that means easier compliance as well as greater security and peace of mind for staff and customers.

From reactive to proactive 

Solutions like Mist do more than just help businesses manage the most urgent threats; they also empower us to actively reduce risk . The data tracked by Mist can help identify high-traffic areas and take steps to reduce congestion, like redirecting people or limiting non-essential access to certain areas. Of course, this brings up questions around data privacy and security, which is why Mist for its part doesn’t collect or store any personal health information on its cloud. The identification of individuals is left to the customer’s business policies and processes.

Installing a solution like Mist and Kontakt.io may require a network infrastructure refresh, like installing Bluetooth beacons or upgrading backhaul bandwidth (apart from, of course, installing the Mist access points themselves). If your customers seem hesitant to take the plunge, a proof of concept can be implemented to demonstrate the viability of the solution. I’d recommend encouraging them with the fact that such solutions will help them open a whole new range of business benefits – giving them the data to better understand and optimise operations, predict potential breakdowns or risks, and much more.