Wireless

If you want the mobility to do business wherever and whenever you wish, a wireless network offers a great solution for your small business. Fast, affordable and easy to set up, wireless networks can be your company's shortcut to increased productivity, decreased networking costs and enhanced employee collaboration.

But if you decide to go wireless, it's important to implement adequate security measures up front. Let's look at the decisions involved in selecting the right type of wireless network. Next, we'll take a quick look at the steps involved in setting one up and ensuring its security.

Do You Need a Server to Go Wireless?

When selecting a wireless network for your company, you will have two primary options: A network that includes a server and one that doesn't. Which is best for you? The answer is mostly a matter of your business needs.

If you're the sole employee of your business — or if you have a partner or two and don't anticipate that your company will grow any time soon — you can set up a fast and fully functional wireless network without a server.
 
But if there are more than a handful of people on your payroll — or if you expect your business to grow significantly in the near future — you need to consider including a server in your network to ensure that it functions as quickly and reliably as possible. The chart below should help you decide what kind of network to set up for your company.

Wireless Network without a Server	Wireless Network with a Server
Best suited for small office/home office (SOHO) environments.	Smart choice for small to medium businesses, especially those with aggressive growth plans.
Relatively easy for a novice to set up.	Does not require significant technical knowledge to set up, but novices may need outside technical support/help desk.
Requires a wireless gateway or wireless router.	Requires one or more wireless gateways that support 802.11X network.
Does not provide centralized management of user accounts or user authentication.	Enables centralized management of user accounts and user authentication.
Provides limited methods to control or manage workgroup members.	Provides robust methods to manage domain member accounts. Controls can be fine-tuned.

Whichever option you choose, you can gain a wealth of advantages with your new wireless network, including an instantly more flexible office environment. Unlike a wired network — which requires that you drill holes in your office walls and floors and run cables to and from phone jacks, network devices and peripherals — a wireless infrastructure enables you to easily reconfigure your office space as your company grows and changes.

Wireless networks also allow you and your employees to use your notebooks throughout the office, unchaining you from your desks.

Security Considerations

But to fully take advantage of these and the many other benefits of a wireless network, it's critical to set up a network that's as secure as possible. A secure network setup will enable you to:

• Dramatically reduce your network's exposure to viruses, spyware and spam — all of which can bring your systems to their knees if left unchecked.
• Limit access to the network to only those people you have explicitly authorized to use it, such as employees, customers, vendors and partners.
• Keep malicious hackers and snooping competitors from getting into the network to steal or manipulate important company information.

Setting Up the Wireless Network

Setting up a wireless network with or without a server is typically a task that most small businesses can handle on their own. To connect your company's wireless network, you should:

1. Start with the gateway: The main component of a wireless network is a wireless access point or gateway — most often, a router — which serves as the central hub connecting all computers and peripherals to either a broadband Internet connection or an existing local area network (LAN). For small businesses with 25 computers or less, only one gateway is needed. For more computers, an extra gateway will likely be necessary to ensure ready access, but because they start at less than $200, the additional expense is minimal.
2. Connect the gateway: Place the wireless gateway in a central location in your offices as high up in the room as possible and connect your wireless router to either your high-speed Internet router or your existing wired LAN. The normal range for a gateway in a typical office environment is 75 feet to 100 feet, but in an obstacle-free area, the range can increase to as much as 1,000 feet. Ranges can also be increased with the use of repeaters or signal boosters that can be sprinkled throughout an office.
3. Connect the computers: To ensure that everyone in the office can access and communicate on the wireless network, each of their desktop or notebook computers must support wireless fidelity (WiFi) networking. Most computers on the market today have this capability. Older computers can easily be made WiFi-ready by installing an inexpensive wireless card in them.
4. Bring on the devices: After you've connected all the desktops and notebooks in your office, your entire team should be able to share and transfer files, connect to the Internet, use e-mail and collaborate with clients. You can also connect printers, scanners and other peripherals around the office, either by buying WiFi-enabled peripherals or installing wireless networking cards or other connection devices in existing equipment. Once a printer or other peripheral is on the network, it can be shared by all the computers in the network. In other words, there's no need to buy a printer for every employee, which saves additional dollars.

Securing the Wireless Network

When you and your team are connected to a wireless network, your communications are transmitted through radio frequencies rather than over a closed cable. Because this open-air communication is more vulnerable to outside attack than its counterpart, it's vital to make sure your network is as secure as it can be. Fortunately, there are number of cost-effective ways to do exactly that. Below are some of the basic steps to help protect your company from common vulnerabilities:

1. Install security software: Installing and keeping a current version of security software on all your employees' computers is a necessary first step to any company network. This software helps protect against viruses, worms, spyware and other threats that are transmitted over the Internet, as well as files imported from USB keys, instant messaging and other means.
2. Manage from a central location: It's a good idea to set up your network so that you are able to view and manage all of your company's computers from one central location. This step, which you can achieve by using solutions such as Dell's OpenManage™ Network Manager, can give you the added confidence that all your PCs have the same level of protection.
3. Use a firewall: A firewall is a protective barrier that prevents unwanted access to or from your company network. The firewall scans all traffic passing in and out of your network and blocks unauthorized messages, intruders and viruses. Firewalls can be either hardware appliances or software applications. In a wireless network, a hardware firewall is typically installed in the network gateway. In fact, many of the leading routers on the market come with a hardware firewall already built in.
4. Use encryption: Because data is most vulnerable to theft when it's being transmitted, one of the best ways to protect it is to encrypt it. When data is encrypted, it is scrambled to make it worthless to any unauthorized person who accesses it. The data is automatically unscrambled when accessed by authorized users. To ensure that your company's data is encrypted, install the latest encryption software on your network server and update it regularly.
5. Use security protocols: Most wireless gateways today are automatically equipped with media access control (MAC) address filtering technology, a great tool that enables you to control access to your company's network on the network gateway. With MAC address filtering, the network will only recognize — and allow access to — users with an approved MAC address, a code that's unique to every mobile wireless card installed inside a desktop, notebook or other wireless device. If your router/access point doesn't recognize the device's MAC address, then the person using that device can't get into your network. Combining MAC address filtering with WiFi protected access (WPA), another protocol built into most routers, you can further increase up your network's security. The addition of WPA provides password protection. With password protection, only people whose wireless devices have the same exact pass code as your network's gateway can enter your company network.
6. Go virtual and use tunneling and encryption: Adopting a virtual private network (VPN), is a cost-effective solution to help you and your employees to securely connect with your company's internal network through an Internet connection. Because VPNs rely on public or shared networks, concerns about their security are common. But by combining tunneling and encryption, a VPN can be protected from even the most determined intruder. Tunneling allows the two ends of your network — the network gateway or router and your employee's notebooks, PDAs and other wireless devices — to communicate across the Internet securely. Because the Internet and your network speak different languages, tunneling packages "translate" the information that you or your employees send in a way that the Internet can understand. When you or an employee makes a VPN connection, software contacts the network gateway and asks for a password to verify that you or your employee is an approved network user. Then the VPN software creates the so-called "tunnel" through which your data is sent back and forth across the network. Encryption makes the information private, scrambling the data so that only those who have the right digital keys can decode it.

A wireless network can give your small business many of the same advantages enjoyed by your larger competitors — at a fraction of the price they pay to maintain their large private networks. From increased productivity and improved morale to the ability to conduct business 24/7, a wireless network can be your ticket to dramatic business growth. Make sure you protect that growth by taking the extra steps to make your network secure.