Wireless Just Got Better with Wave 2

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Whenever you think technology couldn’t possibly get better, it does. Let’s look at the development of the internet as an example. Specifically, wireless solutions.

Since its original creation at Xerox Parc 40 years ago, Ethernet has been the primary method of communication in the business field. However, as more and more technologies have been developed, the speed, freedom, and accessibility of internet is improving, and wireless communication has come into the picture. Today, we are interacting with wireless solutions daily. From radio, GPS, wireless USB or Bluetooth, mobile phones, laptops, wireless mouse, headphones, keyboards, printers, WiFi, satellite television, and more, the capabilities of wireless solutions have been recognized and used for years. In fact, at the end of 2015, carriers had invested over $177 billion into the wireless industry. With this in mind, it’s clear to see that the plug-in ethernet practice is losing its dominance. All these advancements and refinements have led up to the latest and greatest wireless upgrade: 802.11ac – also known as Wave 2 Wireless.

You haven’t experienced internet speed like this before.

Speed

Wave 2 Wireless is a supercharged version of its highly successful precursor, 802.11n. 802.11n was successful because it had provided businesses with the wireless connectivity speeds they needed to embrace Wi-Fi in their day-to-day operations. It let workers use wireless as their primary network medium of choice, and ultimately spurred the modern office wireless movement.

Wave 2 Wireless has not only aided in that process but made it even better. Wave 2 delivers speeds ranging from 433 Mbps (megabits per second) up to several (2.5!) gigabits per second. In order to do this, it works exclusively in the 5GHz band and uses plenty of bandwidth (80 or 160 MHz). It also operates in up to eight spatial streams (MIMO), and according to Wi-Fi Alliance, “Device speeds are proportional to the number of spatial streams.” So, with more streams and larger bandwidth, overall performance is much better. With all of this, you could regularly achieve the top upload/download speed allowed by your Internet provider.

Wave 2 Also Offers Freedom and Flexibility

This topic is a huge one. To begin, Wave 2 employs a kind of technology called beamforming that sends signals directly to client devices. As mentioned briefly in the previous paragraph, Wave 2 also supports multiple inputs and multiple outputs, known by the acronym MIMO. This means that the spectrum of multiple connected devices is much wider, and more and more devices can get on and off of the network. MIMO also greatly reduces the chances for interference and balances out speeds for all connected users.

 

What does this mean? It means you can have more and more access points. If you have multiple wireless access points, remote installations can spread over wide areas and into those hard to reach locations, contributing to the modern office wireless movement. A mobile work culture offers many, many benefits to modern companies. In contrast, traditionally wired infrastructures would be more complicated, expensive, and difficult to employ and maintain.

With the ability to easily support indoor and outdoor access points, you can sit outside or change locations and still remain connected to the internet. And, as mentioned before, Wave 2 supports additional 5 GHz channels. According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, 65% of devices are now dual-band, so that means they can operate in both the 2.4 and 5GHz frequencies. So this means more devices in more places! And don’t worry, Wave 2 has much stronger security protocols, so you don’t have to worry about your data or devices getting attacked from the outside.

The Future of Wireless

In the upcoming future, more and more of our daily work lives will rely on and operate through a Wi-Fi signal. Automatic doors are already getting there, and technology in healthcare is a rapidly expanding field, so it’s only a matter of time before anything that requires wired or manual assistance is run wirelessly. In fact, Gartner (an American research and advisory firm providing information technology-related insight for IT and other business leaders) predicts that 25 billion things will be connected by wireless by the year 2020.

Wireless solutions have had the potential to revolutionize industries by adding flexibility and capability. With these advancements and the convenience that comes with them, it will not be far into the future when wireless becomes as widely adopted as traditional wired networks. And eventually, it may replace them completely!

Don’t let your business fall behind – make the switch.

Cognoscape is here to help you do just that. We will provide you with a custom IT roadmap, which we will tailor to help you succeed. We will keep you up-to-date on all the latest IT trends in various sectors of the industry (like network security, relocation, regulatory compliance, and cloud computing), especially wireless solutions. If you want your business ahead of the global pace, you need to set your company up with Wave 2 wireless, so contact the best IT security and IT support in Dallas, Texas and we’ll get you there!

 

5 data loss nightmares you can learn something from

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No one wants their data lost, stolen, breached, or corrupted … especially if this data incorporates sensitive information.

Like social security numbers.

In this case, the data loss would be less than ideal.

But after the latest round of massive data breaches, most people have almost become desensitized to data loss. After that Equifax breach, it can’t really get any worse, now can it?

Maybe. Maybe not.

However, as a business professional, it’s still your responsibility to protect your company’s data — whether data loss is considered normal or not. And it’s not just breaches you have to worry about. In the Equifax breach, data was simply “exposed.” The data is still there; it’s just also in other places. Nonetheless, the majority of people will lump it into a “data loss” category.

On top of breaches, however, a company needs to worry about cyber attacks that actually take your data (not just expose it). This could be something like ransomware — a threat that encrypts all of your data. Or a run-of-the-mill virus that corrupts your data and makes it indecipherable.

But again, cyber threats aren’t the only things on the data loss block. You also have to think about accidents, natural disasters, hardware malfunctions, and software issues. Each situation is more than capable of taking your data and making it look like it never even existed.

Here are 5 real-life examples of data loss nightmares.

Daily Mail

Daily Mail repeatedly reports on companies that lose data. They detail the events and criticize from afar. So when Daily Mail’s publisher, Associated Newspapers, lost a laptop that contained the sensitive, personal information of thousands of staff members, it was their turn to be criticized.

While the laptop was password-protected, this doesn’t mean the laptop would have been impossible to crack. In the right hands, the names, addresses, and banking information of the affected staffers would have been more than accessible. In fact, to this day, there’s no saying that someone can’t log into the missing computer and maliciously use the information contained on the device.

At the end of the day, a lost device is considered a form of data loss. And in some cases, data loss that stems from a lost or stolen device can be hard to recover from. Imagine if that laptop contained data that was not backed up and hard to replicate.

T-Mobile’s Sidekick

Hardware malfunctions are not fun, especially if those malfunctions have anything to do with your server. At this point, it can quickly go from not fun to reputation damaging, and in 2009 T-Mobile was unlucky enough to feel the sting of a server malfunction.

Back then, Danger was a company owned by Microsoft. It was responsible for making the once popular Sidekicks for T-Mobile. Sidekick data was not stored locally and instead, was stored in the cloud on Microsoft’s servers.

Apparently, a server malfunctioned, which resulted in massive data loss. As a consequence, the majority of Sidekick users lost photos, contacts, calendar entries, and more. It was a dire situation for T-Mobile, especially once it was brought to everyone’s attention that T-Mobile did not have a redundant backup solution.

They were forced to release an embarrassing public apology that gave Sidekick users absolutely no hope for recovery. Instead, they provided helpful tips to “help you rebuild your personal content.”

Ashley Madison

Data breaches don’t always occur for the sake of money. Sometimes, it’s just people looking to stir up some drama — which happened with Ashley Madison back in 2015.

This website isn’t known for anything particularly good. In fact, its tagline is, “Life is short. Have an affair.” It’s not exactly a company that people will openly admit to being involved with. But nonetheless, Ashley Madison users weren’t given very much choice in the matter when hackers discovered a vulnerability in the way login information was stored.

After this vulnerability was discovered and the hackers dumped the personal information of Ashley Madison users on the internet, people were not happy and the company itself was not in a good position.

As a result of the multiple data dumps, people lost their jobs, and others started looking for someone to sue.

National Archives and Records Administration

Daily Mail wasn’t the only business to suffer from data loss as the result of lost or stolen hardware. In 2009, the NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) also suffered the same fate.

But instead of a laptop, an external hard drive went missing. This specific hard drive contained the personal information of people who may have worked or visited the White House during the Clinton administration.

The NARA had to send out more than 15,000 letters to the individuals who may have been affected by the missing hard drive. They notified them of the data breach and offered one year of free credit monitoring services — a service that could definitely get expensive, especially when you’re talking about tens of thousands of people.

And things get even more expensive when you think of the manhours it took to rebuild that lost data (if that was even possible).

The England Prison System

A few years back, a prison in England sent the records of 84,000 prisoners to a consultant firm they had partnered with. Afterwards, an employee at the consultant firm decided it was a good idea to download all of those records onto a personal USB drive.

And of course, that USB drive was lost a few days later.

While this isn’t exactly the prison’s fault, it’s still considered their responsibility, and at the end of the day, the public blames the prison for the loss of data.

Ultimately, this should be a lesson — never partner with a company or person you can’t trust with your sensitive data.

 

These examples of everyday data loss should make it obvious that properly backing up your data is more important than ever. Data loss can happen for a variety of reasons, and no business or industry is immune to these reasons.

If you’re looking for help securing and backing up your data, then give us a call or send us a message today. Here at Cognoscape, we specialize in data backup and recovery, and we’d love to talk to your business about securing its data.