Business Slow To Embrace Wireless - Employees, On The Other Hand...
from the what-do-your-employees-bring-to-work? dept
A new study shows that not only do many companies not have a wireless strategy in place, many don't even have plans to set one up. For many companies, it sounds like they're so afraid of the horror stories about wireless security that they're avoiding it altogether. The end result, though, is that employees are just going ahead and coming up with their own wireless solutions - making the security issue worse. Employees are getting their own devices or setting up their own WiFi networks without looking into the overall security issues. An IT staff that doesn't have a wireless policy because they don't want to dig into the security issues is actually making their security worse.
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Ummm... Did I read that right?
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Re: Ummm... Did I read that right?
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Wasted money
At one time many of us had Cisco wireless PCMCIA cards that had a high level security key and everything was fine.
Then one of the IT managers heard that it was possible to 'hack' a wireless connection and get onto the network and so they turned off all the access points and recalled all the cards.
Then a few months later they put up all new access points but never distributed cards to go with them. That was 18+ months ago and we still don't know if we'll ever be able to use wireless again.
The access points were set up in the centers of each building and provided decent reception to more than 80% of the interior. People located around the perimeter of the building could sometimes get a connection but not always.
I walked my laptop around the outside of several buildings when it was working and I was never able to get a signal outside (we have some picnic tables setup in nice shady spots outside and it would have been nice to have worked from there at times).
All of our buildings are secured and require cardkey access and several have security guards as well, so we don't have to worry about strangers inside the buildings accessing the networks and although I suppose someone could build a directional, amplified antenna and sit in the parking lot and point it towards an access point and get a signal, that seems highly unlikely AND we have security camers monitoring the parking lots AND we have security guards who drive police-type cars throughout the parking lot looking for unwelcome guests.
So, until someone decides otherwise, we have several thousand dollars worth of wireless networking equipment that is in place and just going to waste.
I wish they would either turn them on or admit that it's not going to happen and offer to sell the equipment to the employees... :-)
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Re: Wasted money
A cheap directional antenna will pick things up well father away than your PC cards.
WLAN needs to be secured using robust crypto methods and you should not worry about whether you can connect from the parking lot or not.
If fact, I'd like to be able to use from the parking lot on my PDA.
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