CA readies wireless management

Computer Associates International Inc. will take on the exploding world of wireless with a solution aimed at giving information technology managers comprehensive control of enterprise wireless local-area networks (WLANs).

CA's Wireless Site Management (WSM) will provide managers with a central point from which to control access to the network, updates of features such as encryption keys and maintenance of the wireless network's quality.

Working with CA's Unicenter and eTrust management products, WSM gives users a way to tame the wireless environment, said Yogesh Gupta, the company's senior vice president and chief technology officer, and to manage it as an integrated extension of the wired network.

Describing it to attendees at this week's CAWorld meeting in Las Vegas, Gupta said the standalone WSM works by:

* Securing WLAN connections through regular generation, rotation and synchronization of encryption keys based on policies defined by security administrators.

* Enforcing security by defining access zones and restricting network access to authorized users.

* Managing the quality and performance of the WLANs by automatically allocating channels and balancing the number of connections at each access point and through event management.

IT managers can, through WSM, see where the physical limits of the wireless enterprise are and limit access to the network within defined boundaries. They can also limit access by each user to certain times of the day.

At the same time, Computer Associates officials announced its Web Services Distributed Management solution, which provides close control of individual Web services and on-demand service-oriented architecture environments. It's available as either a separate product or a hosted CA service.

The company also described how it intends to meet customer demand for more enterprise-strength open-source solutions by distributing its Ingres Enterprise Relational Database for Linux to the open-source development community by the end of August.

Robinson is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. He can be reached at hullite@mindspring.com.