To compete in today's fast-paced competitive environment, organizations are increasingly allowing contractors, partners, visitors and guests to access their internal enterprise networks.These users may connect to the network through wired ports in conference rooms or offices, or via wireless access points. In allowing this open access for third parties, LANs become(6) .Third parties can introduce risk in a variety of ways from connecting with an infected laptop to unauthorized access of network resources to(7)activity. For many organizations, however,the operational complexity and costs to ensure safe third party network access have been prohibitive. Fifty-two percent of surveyed CISOs state that they currently use a moat and castle's security approach, and admit that defenses inside the perimeter are weak. Threats from internal users are also increasingly a cause for security concerns. Employees with malicious intent can launch (8) of service attacks or steal (9) information by snooping the network. As they access the corporate network, mobile and remote users inadvertently can infect the network with (10) and worms acquired from unprotected public networks. Hackers masquer-ading as internal users can take advantage of weak internal security to gain access to confidential information.

WLANs are increasingly popular because they enable cost-effective connections among people, applications and data that were not possible, or not cost-effective, in the past. For example, WLAN-based applications can enable fine-grained management of supply and distribution (1) to improve their efficienty and reduce (2) .WLANs can also enable entirely new business processes. To cite but one example, hospitals are using WLAN-enabled point-of-care applications to reduce errors and improve overall (3) care. WLAN management solutions provide a variety of other benefits that can be substantial but difficult to measure. For example, they can protect corporate data by preventing (4) through rogue access points. They help control salary costs, by allowing IT staffs to manage larger networks without adding staff. And they can improve overall network mananement by integrating with customers' existing systems, such as OpenView and UniCenter. Fortunately, it isn't necessary to measure these benefits to justify investing in WLAN management solutions, which can quickly pay for themselves simply by minimizing time-consuming(5) and administrative chores.