Could your business use wireless LAN?
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Gary Duke, director at LAN 2 LAN looks at how extending the parameters of your business securely can benefit your company Gary Duke, director at LAN 2 LAN looks at how extending the parameters of your business securely can benefit your company.
Businesses like yours are increasingly using Wireless LAN (WLAN) to extend their parameters. No doubt you’re already adopting some mobile elements, be it laptops, smartphones or outside network access. But would a workplace without wires actually make a difference to your business, and is it safe?
The answer to both questions is probably ‘yes’, providing you do it right.
A report by Gartner states that up until the end of this year, the misconfiguration of WLAN access points and client software will account for nearly three-quarters of security attacks. However, this need not be the case if implemented correctly and in accordance with the specific needs of the organisation.
Organisational Benefits
WLAN is supporting a new de-facto way of working for many companies, with benefits to both users and IT management staff.
For staff, it represents freedom from their desk. Being issued with a laptop rather than a desktop means that they are on ‘home territory’ wherever they move to, with full access to all the resources to which they are accustomed.
This isn’t just a theoretical benefit. In companies where WLAN has been deployed, employees carrying their laptops from meeting to meeting have become a very common sight.
These benefits are amplified when IP telephony is taken into consideration. Whether using a headset with a softphone (an application on the laptop) or a separate wireless handset, WLAN allows staff to remain in telephone contact in the usual manner completely seamlessly, with no requirement for any fiddling with cables.
An interesting side-effect of supporting this working style within business premises is that it promotes the same approach beyond the physical boundaries of the building.
Having a laptop means your staff can take their work home with them if a deadline is looming and can work in exactly the same desktop environment as in the office, and with IP telephony implemented they are even available on their usual extension.
For IT managers, the main benefit is that facilitating constant movement of staff around the building incurs absolutely zero management overhead. The management of connectivity all happens automatically in accordance with the initial configuration, and problems arising from worn and faulty sockets become a thing of the past.
Furthermore, if the correct technology and security policies are deployed, your IT manager will actually have a much better picture of the activities of individual users across the WLAN, something that is beneficial both for security and troubleshooting purposes.
And then there are the environmental benefits to everyone in the form of a tidier, cable-free office.
Planning for WLAN
However, careful planning is needed to obtain all these benefits, along with a thorough understanding of both the organisation’s existing IT policies and all potential WLAN options.
Selection of the right equipment is also essential. A solution that uses a central switch to control both user sessions and access point configuration, such as those provided by Trapeze and 3Com, provides an excellent foundation for simple management of sophisticated installations.
Not only does it provide for robust and transparent management of users, but it also helps to minimise IT department overheads by allowing for the automatic addition of new radios to expand coverage areas, something that has previously been extremely time consuming.
Setting the Security Standard
Security has long been a hot topic in WLAN. Since the early days of insecure MAC authentication and static-key Wired Equivalent Privacy, WEP encryption, the IEEE standard, has come a long way.
The introduction of 802.1x authentication has enabled network managers to authenticate users with their standard domain logins, often in a manner that is completely invisible to the user.
If you look beyond the jargon this simply means your staff won’t feel like they’re passing through a metal detector every time they log in.
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