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Does your wired network know what your wireless network is doing? Protection is key.

Article Excerpt
After years of planning, your company has finally architected and deployed a comprehensive network management strategy and can breathe a sigh of relief, right? Not so fast. Does this network management strategy encompass the wireless portion of your network? If not, your intellectual property could be flapping in a very vulnerable breeze.

Networks that have wires and wireless components need management solutions that address both types of networks. Unfortunately, most of the options available look at only one side of the equation. In this article, we'll take a look at the ways that companies are exposed when the wireless network functions outside of the wired management system and explore options for bringing these two strategic functions back in sync for total network health and security.

What is Network Management?

There are probably as many different definitions of network management as there are users of network management and vendors. For normalization purposes, I've edited a definition down to something that addresses most end users' concerns:

Network management components perform specific tasks to monitor and manage the security, health, and availability of various aspects of the network. Network management components also collect and retain a rich set of data about network operations. Network management solutions reduce the complexity of deployment by applying self-managing capabilities to deliver high levels of automation that can relieve the staff from fixing, configuring, and maintaining the network.

What's important to note in this definition is that it isn't concerned with whether the data is traveling over a wire, over the air, or through two tin cans tied together with string. The endpoint systems could be employees or consultants, inside the corporate campus, at a remote ISP site, or on the other side of the world via the Internet, using desktops, PDAs, smartphones, or laptops. This is by design--a network and management of that network must take into consideration all of the devices and users of that network.

Network management was not always this complex. In the not-too-distant past, corporate networks were populated by servers housed on site and desktops cabled into the network. The Internet upped the ante by allowing in users from all over the globe on a 24x7 basis, but for the most part, these users came in via a single perimeter access point that could...

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