Conclusion: Maintaining a Secure Infrastructure

Conclusion: Maintaining a
Secure Infrastructure

In this pages 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. 119