Network professionals at last month’s Globalcomm 2006 conference said they are exploiting the latest wireless and mobile technologies to get employees closer to customers and increase productivity, but are constantly facing new security challenges in doing so.
“You can connect more, but guess what? More direct attacks,” said Andy Farkas, assistant vice-president of emerging technologies at Capmark Financial Group, a mortgage servicing company in Horsham, Pa. “More malware, more software patching [which] costs more money. So the more we give our employees to connect, the more vulnerabilities we’re going to have to face.”
Farkas delivered a keynote address at Globalcomm, a big new telecom industry show that grew out of the defunct Supercomm event. In addition to highlighting the latest mobile computing trends, the show featured announcements and demos from telecom service and equipment providers such as AT&T, which outlined plans to upgrade its MPLS backbone to 40Gbps speeds this summer.
In his address, Farkas described his company’s extensive use of wireless. Capmark has 3,000 employees in 100 offices in nine countries. The company has a campus Wi-Fi