Wireless’ flexibility earns praise
Technology?s usefulness garners attention, but security concerns remain up in the air
TWELVE MONTHS AFTER the attacks that left the Pentagon and New York’s financial district in rubble, organizations both private and public are still sorting out how to assess the lessons of Sept. 11 and incorporate them into future plans.
One result is the realization that companies can’t necessarily count on the wired infrastructure. Companies within a six-block radius of the World Trade Center were relocated because “their infrastructure was gone,” points out Ken Evans, vice president of marketing and product manager at Oldsmar, Fla.-based Fortress Technologies, which builds highly secure IEEE 802.11x networks.
The solution was the WLAN. Many workers trying to re-establish offices had nothing to connect to, but those with wireless capabilities set up triage zones in hotel conference rooms, for example, Evans says.
What helped the New York offices of Merrill Lynch through the days immediately following the disaster were investments in IEEE 802.11 and VOIP (voice over IP), says John McKinley, CTO of Merrill Lynch. The “wall-to-wall” WLAN deployments in some buildings allowed for what McKinley calls “dynamic work space reconfiguration.” Some buildings had two to three times the planned occupancy, so Merrill Lynch employees drove to Jersey City, N.J., offices and plugged in their VOIP phones.
“The phones automatically hunted their way back through our network, and we had dial tone literally overnight,” McKinley explains.
Congress took steps to protect itself by giving Research In Motion BlackBerries to senators and representatives, notes Ken Dulaney, chief strategist at Gartner in San Jose, Calif.
“It’s a rudimentary data processing system, but at least the collective knowledge can remain in place,” Dulaney says.
Despite heightened awareness of the need for corporate security, especially to protect wireless gateways in and out of the enterprise, not much is actually being done, according to Trevor Fiatal, co-founder and chief security officer at Seven in Redwood City, Calif. Seven supplies the technology behind Cingular’s and Sprint’s enterprise solutions for wireless access to e-mail and legacy applications.
“There’s an uptick in the awareness of the need [for wireless security], but it does not correlate well with a change in strategy. But initiatives have been stepped up, and things that were on the back burner have been brought off the back burner,” Fiatal says.
One change Fiatal notices is some companies that allowed IMAP (Internet Messaging Access Protocol) access to the corporate mail server prior to Sept. 11 are now requiring a VPN client and other more formalized procedures to access corporate data.
On the technology front, companies such as InterDigital, in King of Prussia, Pa., are working to speed deployment of 3G technologies that will give companies high-speed access to their massive back-end databases.
InterDigital creates the core technology found in every handset and base station that allows devices to communicate wirelessly. Currently, it is working on TDD (Time Division Duplex), part of the 3G standard which will enable companies to wirelessly access storage systems.
“TDD is the data workhorse in 3G technology for transmission of lots of information flowing from office to user or vice versa. You can send more information over a wireless network at higher speeds at greater reliability,” says Rip Tilden, chief operating officer of InterDigital.
Many companies contacted were reluctant to comment on their wireless plans, perhaps to avoid publicizing vulnerabilities, says Rob Enderle, chief analyst at Giga in San Jose, Calif. Wireless technologies allow a company to disperse both people and data so that there is no central point of failure, but at the same time there is a negative pressure on deploying wireless because “companies are very concerned about security,” Enderle says.
