Verizon Business today added management of wireless Local Area Networks to its portfolio of managed services, becoming the first major service provider to do so. The company said it will partner with wireless LAN vendor Aruba Networks for its initial product offering.

Verizon Business Managed Wireless LAN (WLAN) Service is aimed at the growing number of wireless LANs in the enterprise market, intending to solve the management and security issues surrounding those new efforts.

“One of the things we know is that the wireless technology is still in its early stages,” said Cliff Cibelli, group manager of Verizon’s Managed Network Service portfolio. “The time is right to enter the market with a standard product offering. We have multiple customers dipping their toes into the technology but they don’t have the ability to scale it across the enterprise with all the complexities and the challenges such as security. This is something we can address for them.”

Verizon chose Aruba’s wireless LAN technology over that of rival Cisco Systems because of its centralized management architecture and integrated security features, said Merle Rosenfeld, product manager for the managed LANs. More than likely, Verizon will expand its service to include Cisco’s wireless LAN technology at a later date, Cibelli said.

Large enterprises are looking at wireless LANs for multiple reasons, including reduction in cost for moves, adds and changes and internal wiring, and the need to provide flexible yet secure access for group work and collaboration and for partners and guests, who more frequently now show up with laptop in hand.

“The initial application is the ability to provide guest-type access – a lot of enterprises have consultants or accounting firms that come in on a periodic basis, and rather than have to provide them with secure access from a network with hard-wired connection, they can use wireless LAN service to give them secure access back to their networks,” Cibelli said. Often, companies can justify the cost of the wireless LAN hardware with the reduced costs of wiring and moving employees from one office to another, he said.

Security is a major issue for wireless LAN deployment, and one that Verizon is addressing in a major way, Rosenfeld said.
“One of the key objectives as we took a look at how we are going to provide the service and the partner we chose was security – one of the top concerns of executives were clearly for wireless security,” he said.

Using Aruba’s wireless LAN technology gives Verizon a centralized view of the wireless LAN network and an integrated security system, Rosenfeld added.

“We knew we had to have a centralized way of accessing the network – it is difficult to get a comprehensive view in discrete pieces,” he said. “Aruba pioneered centralized management architecture with lightweight access points and wireless LAN controllers. We felt they had developed it most strongly.”
Most other wireless LAN vendors offer security via overlay networks, which add management complexity and cost, while Aruba has integrated a security channel, Rosenfeld said.

“Aruba has integrated security into the core of their network design,” he said. “That provides the ability to separate out user communities – in virtual LANs or VLANs – and assign and enforce policies again on end users, within the wireless space. It can enforce policies down to the user level, regardless of where the user is.”

The Verizon service also provides the ability to detect “rogue” wireless access points, such as those employees may have set up behind the corporate firewall, posing direct threats to corporate networks, Cibelli said.

“We can tell them what office on what floor the rogue access point is operating in,” he said.

Verizon’s approach is also scalable, enabling enterprises to grow to thousands of desktops, as needed, he said.

The service is being offered on either a stand-alone basis or as an extension to Verizon’s existing managed service portfolio.