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Company: Honest John's Mobile Phones
This company wants to install a wireless network in its office, but has serious concerns about the security of wireless.
Approximate budget:Â Open
Requires:Â Wireless access points sufficient for 150 mobile users, with strong security and management features.
Concerns: The make-or-break feature will be the built-in security; consumer-level security such as WEP or a basic firewall will not be sufficient. Likewise, the management features of the access points must be up to enterprise standards, and the ability to manage the access points centrally will be a major consideration.
Best solution: For comprehensive wireless security and management features, Nortel provides an excellent system, at a price. Companies should never spend more on protecting an asset than the asset itself is worth, so Nortel's package will suit the requirements of larger businesses. For a fully-featured security solution at a more SME-friendly price, the SonicWALL range also helps busy admins reduce the amount of work they need to do configuring their various security systems.
Things to look out for...
- Ease of management. If you are looking to deploy more than three or four access points in the company, then a centrally managed system may be worth looking at. Even if you plan to start off small but may be expanding the wireless network in the future, a centrally managed system is worth considering.
- Support for security standards. Some wireless systems require proprietary cards or client software to run securely. This can lead to added support costs involved in setting up clients and supporting them. Also, if the system requires proprietary vendors cards, these may be expensive or may not interoperate well with the equipment that they are being installed into. They do not provide very good futureproofing.
- Support for different standards. Not knowing what equipment your users may wish to connect to the wireless network could potentially cause troubles. Try to ensure that the access points you select support both 802.11a and 802.11g. Remember g is backward compatible with b, so basically you would be covering all current standards. (Don't worry about 108Mbps for the time being, this is not a "standard" speed yet and is proprietary to a few vendors.)
- Ease of deployment. Power over Ethernet (PoE) is a technology fast becoming popular now for a variety of applications from VoIP to WLAN, this eases the deployment by having to only provide a single RJ45 cable to the access point. This provides both data and power needs. Configuration should also be considered when deploying a solution, so those larger deployments should really consider centralised management solutions, as these generally enable the administrator to set policies and configuration options for the access points and then push them out to the hardware. This also enables centralised reconfiguration, updates, redundancy, and reporting.
