Next week at the Wi-Fi Planet Conference & Expo in San Jose, Calif., WLAN monitoring company Red-M will unveil its latest product that will bring them into the WLAN control arena as well.
The product, Red-Vision, will power the company’s intrusion detection system (IDS), monitor hardware and software usage by clients, and manage the wireless infrastructure as well, according to Karl Feilder, president and CEO of Red-M, who spoke to Wi-Fi Planet from Taipei.
The software runs as a central console in a network operating center, which can be accessed by administrators over any secure browser connection.
Feilder says the security aspects of the service are meant to not only keep the bad guys out but the good guys in.
“Mobility causes problems,” says Feilder.
He compares the software to other management tools like Airwave by saying the others have to team up with vendors to provide all the security: “They do two out of three. But three out of three is better.”
The software is part of the Red-M suite of products, so it works as part of the Red-Detect IDS system and uses hardware probes to monitor the airwaves. In fact, the company says it sells most of its probes to companies that want to make sure there’s no wireless hardware setup at all, whether its 802.11a/b/g or even Bluetooth (an aspect of wireless Fielder says no one else takes seriously as an intrusion threat, but he says his company can quickly show in any demonstration how people can get network access using it).
Client software on each employee’s system identifies who belongs on the network, and helps monitor what they’re using.
Feilder says the Red-Vision is “based on the philosophy that you can’t manage everything in a wireless environment.” Just the individual aspects of each laptop could be thousands of bits of irrelevant data. Instead, the software lets the network administrator define the normal mode of operation for the network — anything from the 802.11 protocol they run to what version of the Windows OS they use — and the Red-Vision monitor only reports on deviations from that norm.
“This would be a good service for even a wired network, but we’ve customized it for mobility of users,” says Feilder. “HP OpenView and Tivoli can’t cope with mobility, but our user interface is built around geographic maps” of the office. Eventually they plan to release modules for Red-Vision that will introduce features such as real-time positioning and more.
Do you want a first hand look at Red-Vision?
Join us at the Wi-Fi Planet Conference
& Expo, December 2 – 5, 2003 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, CA.Red-M’s CEO Karl Feilder will be showing off Red-Vision in a Product Spotlight at 11am on Dec. 3 at the show.
