Cisco Wireless

Implementing Location Awareness in your Organization

Hi folks, so if there is one thing that is annoying it’s misplacing things. Whether it’s some sort of important customer inventory, or whether it’s a piece of hardware you own and you need to know it’s whereabouts. What do people do in large organizations where you need to keep track of things?

Location awareness! In this day and age of wireless, there should be a technology out there that can be leveraged to help us with this and there is. Using RFID you can tag valuable mobile equipment or product and then use a device to keep track of where that stuff is in your organization.

Cisco has a product called the Cisco Wireless Location Appliance that does just this and fits into the grand scheme of their Cisco Unified Wireless Network. Something like this would be deployed in an environment with wireless controllers and managed lightweight APs across your network. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more of a need for these kind of things as mobile devices and our need to keep track of them becomes more prevalent in the years to come. You can read more about this here.

-RP

Containing Rogue Wireless Lans in your Corporate Environment

So one of the more common technologies I see being implemented in my day to day work is wireless. Wireless is one of those mixed bags. It’s a great technology that offers a lot of convenience to your users but at the same time it can be a huge security risk and a pain to maintain.

One of the more common problems you might seen in a corporate environment is users buying their own cheap wireless access point like a Linksys or D-Link from their local electronics retailer and plugging it into a network port in their office to give them wireless capabilities. This isn’t only bad for security, but it can also interfere with any wireless networks you already have setup.

Luckily Cisco has an answer to this problem. If you use the Cisco wireless controllers, they have a feature built-in to stop this. They refer to non-authorized wireless in your environment as “Rogue AP’s”. These rogue AP’s can be “contained” by use of the Cisco software. All you have to do is tell the wireless controller to contain any rogue AP’s it sees and from that point on it renders those AP’s useless in your corporate environment.

For information on the Cisco wireless solution, check out this link here.

-RP