In what is almost certain to be the biggest IT security announcement of the year, Intel has announced plans to acquire McAfee in a $7.6 billion move designed to harden the security of the mobile Internet.

The deal is expected to lead to the widespread deployment of embedded security features in smartphones and other handheld Internet terminals. Intel says this will prevent the mobile Internet falling victim to the same levels of malware penetration that have afflicted the PC world. Continue Reading

Matt Perry, technical director at Aerohive reckons that wireless network controllers were not put in place for management reasons: “In any enterprise wireless network of any reasonable size, there will be multiple controllers – another layer of complexity: Access Points (APs), controllers and a separate management system. We see it as inevitable that controllers are not the correct route for wi-fi networks.” Continue Reading

Wireless Security – advancing from the traditional “one-size-fits-all” approach

As we have seen, mobile devices and network technologies have evolved in recent years, giving the executive road warrior, field service representative and teleworker access to corporate networks, databases and applications from virtually anywhere.

Despite these advances many organizations are still unfamiliar with the latest remote access technologies and are unsure how to address the biggest mobile deployment concerns we highlighted in the last section, namely cost control, available bandwidth and security.

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New Challenges, New Requirements

The combination of concerns on security coupled with the need for mobile and wireless being up in the top three of the priority list for CIOs and IT managers, suggests that analyzing the degree of mobility within the workforce is key to selecting the appropriate infrastructure solution.

IT managers have mobile workers in the office, as well as on the road. There are those whose jobs are entirely mobile but an increasing number of people who would characterize themselves as conventional office workers also want to connect occasionally from home, airport, the coffee shop, or even as they move about an office campus. When it comes to managing an infrastructure, it’s no wonder that many IT managers are nostalgic for the days when everything was contained within the controlled boundaries of the data centre.

Let’s look at some specifics as to how wireless connectivity makes things more complex. Continue Reading

The expected April Fools variant of the Conficker worm reappearing is a technology scare possibly on par with planes falling out of the sky at the turn of the millennium. Will it infect me? Will the Internet break? Will it restart the Large Hadron Collider, create a black hole and suck us all into oblivion? Probably not. What will actually happen, if anything, is still unknown but the hype is sure to panic the estimated 10-12 million or so already infected computers around the world and ensure that security vendors make a tidy sum on last minute upgrades and product purchases and that IT departments will become the companies “new best friend” and be allowed to step up a gear to be prepared for this and other potential attack vectors. Continue Reading