Companies partner for unified WLAN security

Wireless LAN equipment vendor Meru Networks, and security company iPolicy are putting their technology together to respond to threats originating from WLANs.

Meru has been little seen in Europe so far, but has promised to use venture money to launch here this year - starting at next week's Wireless LAN Event. "The joint Meru-iPolicy products will also be available in Europe," said Kamal Anand, vice-president of marketing and sales at Meru.

iPolicy's security and management platform will be integrated in Meru's Wi-Fi switch (which it calls a Controller), a box that already controls access points remotely across an Ethernet network, enforcing policy and handling RF resource management.

The iPolicy box will add intrusion protection, anti-virus as a deep inspection (up to layer seven) firewall protection, content filtering and surveillance. "Every laptop now can be an entry point for different kinds of attacks and viruses and all kinds of intrusion capability and that's why it is very important to protect the network at the wireless edge," said Anand.

Anand said that Meru had thought about developing the added security in-house, but was concerned that, as a wireless company, it wouldn't have done as thorough a job as an outside security systems provider.

This announcement by Meru is one of a series the industry has seen from WLAN switch vendors that have really been tightening the screws on their security capabilities, said Richard Webb, directing analyst, WLANs, at Infonetics Research."It's really a case that enterprises may need some help understanding how to secure them, but the technology is there," said Webb.