Swede Inspiration

The increasing popularity of enterprise wireless LAN technology has been a boon not only for mobile employees, but also hackers. For both, it's easier than ever to access corporate data on the go.

So for many companies, Stockholm, Sweden-based software developer Columbitech's promise to deliver the kind of wireless security and reliability typically found only in wireline networks is music to their ears. (Like that other Swedish export, ABBA.)

Touting the industry's only roaming wireless virtual private network (VPN) platform that encompasses true end-to-end security, Columbitech's wireless suite (see figure) appeals to Fortune 100 customers with an always-on solution that relies on wireless layer transport security protocol instead of more common IP security standards. (For all intents and purposes, WLTS is like a wireless riff on SSL 3.0.)

“Security can never happen at the expense of the user experience, but that's what happens when you apply traditional wireline security in a wireless environment,” said Columbitech founder and CEO Pontus Bergdahl. He cited a real-world example: “Let's say you're a UPS employee and you drive into a parking garage — if you lose your wireless connection, then you have to start all over again.”

Columbitech's always-on solution eliminates the need to log back in, and it saves customers time and money by compressing data to as little as one-third its original size. (Now if only they could do something about UPS drivers' brown trucks and uniforms — man, those are ugly.)

Columbitech's solutions make pretty good sense in the context of the enterprise market, which begs a rather important question: As carriers develop and expand wireless data services for their own enterprise customers, what are they doing to buffer security in the wireless LAN? The answer: Apparently, not much.

“While carriers say they want to provide advanced enterprise services, they don't seem able to do that,” Bergdahl said. “The reason why is that if you're going to provide a VPN connection, when you launch that service you get into a whole range of complex issues carriers are not used to, like what's inside the corporate network or even dealing with the IT department. Can that change? Sure. But it's something we haven't seen anyone pull off yet. Carriers could have a subsidiary that just focuses on security.”

Or, they could partner up with a company like Columbitech. “We're not working with mobile carriers,” Bergdahl said. “But it's not that we haven't tried.”