WiFi has many benefits, but since its inception the suspicion has lingered that security was not one of them. True, more and more users now feel confident about the security of their networks, but worries about security remain high on users' priorities.
Joanie Wexler reports that security concerns top the list of enterprise WLAN deployment challenges. Still, there is improvement here, since in 2006 "only" 70 percent of enterprise respondents ranked security as their most pressing problem with WLANs, compared with 73 percent the year before. The growing confidence in WLAN security is the result of the growing use of security technologies now available. We note that even though most enterprises are still using Layer-3 VPNs to secure their WLANs, the percentage of enterprises which use link-layer WPA2 increased from 22 percent last year to 33 percent this year. The use of WPA (WPA2 minus the AES form of encryption) also increased from 29 percent to 36 percent, indicating that enterprises are starting to take advantage of the robust technologies available to them. The increase employment of upgraded security protocols resulted in diminished reliance of older protocols: The use of WEP, MAC address filtering and disabling service set identifiers (SSID) as a primary security approach declined by about 8 percentage points.
For more on WiFi security:
- see Joanie Wexler's Networkworld report