AirTight Networks (News - Alert), a principal company for wireless intrusion prevention systems (WIPS) and other products that provide secure Wi-Fi access, just announced that Gartner has analyzed the firm's products and services, rating them at a "Strong Positive" in the 2012 Marketscope for Wireles LAN Intrusion (News - Alert) Prevention Systems.

Gartner's Marketscope ratings go from a "Strong Negative" for organizations providing poor quality services, to a "Strong Positive" for firms that provide the highest-quality services on the scale.

The vendors listed in Marketscope are scored on the following criteria: Customer experience, offering/product strategy, overall viability, marketing execution and product/service.

The report summarizes the following: "Just like wired networks, wireless networks need to be monitored to both proactively detect vulnerabilities to accelerate mitigation and to quickly detect security incidents to support rapid incident response."

Further in the report: "Further advances in other wireless technologies and general concerns about the use of smartphones have carried the scope of WLAN IPS beyond Wi-Fi, and vendors in this market are expanding into Bluetooth, mobile phones, wireless cameras, active RFID, cordless phones, and other non-Wi-Fi services."

Regarding AirTight Networks, the report compliments the company on its Marker Packet technology, saying that it "is a fast way to identify rogue traffic over the air, providing a high-confidence means to associate traffic with wireless senders."

The piece notes one of AirTight's challenges as a problem in which "buyers are less likely to know of AirTight when making competitive decisions for cloud services and integrated, secure Wi-Fi access."

"Two trends are becoming quite evident. As the BYOD tide rises, organizations will continue to struggle to embrace Wi-Fi access and various smartphones and tablets while tackling the security challenges of these unmanaged devices,” said David King (News - Alert), AirTight's CEO. “Second, the rapid growth of Wi-Fi in remote offices of the distributed enterprise needs the same controls and visibility as the corporate campus. AirTight has addressed this challenge by providing enterprises with both on-premise and cloud WIPS and secure Wi-Fi access solutions to automatically detect and classify all wireless devices on the network in order to apply appropriate security policies to prevent any unauthorized device access to the network regardless of authentication credentials."

The report on AirTight ends by saying that "AirTight is appropriate for buyers that are looking for an easy-to-deploy, strong security overlay solution with minimal training/skill requirements from a separate security provider. AirTight is a good choice when companies need to add IPS and hot spot controls at a time when they are not upgrading their infrastructure. AirTight has sold particularly well in high-security scenarios and to defend against PCI (News - Alert) vulnerabilities.”

“Retail use cases continue to be popular,” it concludes. “All products are available with cloud service administration, monitoring and control."

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