Maintaining a Secure Infrastructure

In this tutorial we have seen how to build an infrastructure, but most important, why it is necessary to take your time in planning every facet of your WLAN by considering your requirements. The essential ingredient in building a secure wireless infrastructure is to ensure that your users' requirements are going to be met in the short term as well as the long term.

Requirements planning allows you to make certain that when you build your WLAN, you can increase your user base and wireless infrastructure without compromising your security.

Knowing how your WLAN will increase as your building facilities and bandwidth needs grow is an important part of being able to determine how you can best bring the network to the far corners of your growing business while making certain that the security of those connections does not become compromised by anyone trying to steal information or corrupt the data on your internal network.

In the end, keeping a watchful eye on your network activity is the most important part of making certain that your wireless resources remain secure. An intrusion detection system, firewalls, and anti-virus software are all important tools that "assist" you in keeping private network resources secure, but they are no substitute for actually reviewing the access attempts and authentication entries from the logs of your wireless routers and access points.

The most difficult step is actually knowing you are under attack. Hackers usually take their time over a period of several days, weeks, or months to try and break into your system undetected. If you are watching for slow but sure activity on your log entries that indicate an attack, you can take a proactive step in assuring that your information remains secure and private.

Your final objective will be to make certain you can create the most secure wireless infrastructure possible in an effort to protect your entire internal network against corporate espionage, damage, and attack.