Technical innovations and market trends have led to proliferation of Wi-Fi. But with its rapid expansion, also comes the necessity of network monitoring, security and visualization. The pain points surrounding these aspects are still unanswered. Addressing these predicaments head on is California headquartered AirTight Networks, a company with R&D & engineering centers in Pune.


AirTight is a company with a difference, owing to its massively scalable controller-less Wi-Fi technology that has bundled the industry's award winning wireless intrusion prevention system (WIPS). With thousands of customers that are the Who's Who of Government, business and industry spanning all continents, the company cuts across geographies and industry verticals.


Enterprise data security still remains the biggest concern for the corporate counsel. Specifically, two new industry trends are evidently making it worse. First, the rapid growth of Wi-Fi in remote offices of distributed enterprises requires the same controls and visibility as the corporate headquarters. Second, as the BYOD tide rises, organizations are striving to embrace Wi-Fi access while tackling challenges in Wi-Fi security. AirTight, through its unique innovative practices, has addressed these challenges by providing both on-premise and cloud based solutions, with over 24 patents.


"Wi-Fi is now becoming a mainstream connectivity vehicle for end users and hence the need for security and manageability is acute," says Kiran Deshpande, Co-Founder & President, AirTight Networks. "Addressing such complex operation deployments are possible with our globally distributed data centers that offer five 9s uptime with local and WAN-based high availability and redundancy,"he adds.


AirTight which was co-founded by Kiran and Prain Bhagwat, CTO, gives customers the power of 802.11n Wi-Fi with the central manageability and the massive scalability of location-aware, multi-tenant, controller-less WLAN.This allows customers to deploy thousands of APs managed by just 3 to 4 AirTight Servers. The servers are offered in a cloud-hosted environment wherein customers do not have to own, operate or manage these. The company hosts its servers in North America, Europe, Korea and South Africa with options for many mirror sites.


Company's other differentiator is its Wi-Fi sensing and classification technology which can enable automatic detection and classification of wireless devices. This in turn applies appropriate security policies to prevent unauthorized devices and connections, regardless of authentication credentials. Many organizations today have used the same to quarantine unauthorized rogue APs on the network, detect employee owned smart devices and not allow these to connect unless approved by Corporate IT, block employees and contractors from using nearby Wi-Fi hotspots closing a back door to ship out corporate data bypassing traditional firewalls, provide complete RF visibility for powerful analytics and easy troubleshooting, detect spoofing of Wi-Fi users, critical for the MCIT regulation.


"Most organizations are realizing that they are fighting a losing battle by trying to restrict employees from using their iPhones, iPads, Androids and Tablets. In today's BYOD culture, we often see three times as many unmanaged personal devices in a customer's airspace than corporate devices. The key to keeping the network secure is to manage those devices. AirTight technology enables secure BOYD onboarding and on-the-go policy enforcements," explains Dr. Pravin Bhagwat, Co-Founder & CTO, AirTight Networks.


Another interesting usage of technology within AirTight is enforcement of the "No Wi-Fi" policy. Highly sensitive sites such as defense establishments, financial institutions and data centers have a strict "No Wi-Fi" policy, however, there is sadly no way to monitor and enforce that policy. AirTight Sensors ensure that there is no Wi-Fi APs on the network and employees and contractors with Wi-Fi enabled devices don't use Wi-Fi.


AirTight solves industry specific problems such as compliances and enables new age applications. Retail, QSR and hospitality industries have used the technology for PCI compliance. Company is building powerful Social Media analytics engine for this industry segment. The company recently published a white paper on RBI compliance. Deshpande says, "While Section 28 of RBI Guidelines discusses wireless security, threats from Wi-Fi based attacks concern entire IT infrastructure, not just Wi-Fi. Consequently, wireless threat management needs to be woven into entire IT security fabric – policies, assessment, audit, end point security, forensics and tools". The technology is also gaining acceptance and popularity among telecom operators who are eying Wi-Fi for their cellular customers.


A discernible trend among company's customers is to use AirTight APs at executive homes. "What you do with your home Wi-Fi can impact security of your corporate data and network," says Deshpande. Organizations need to publish advisory for employees to manage Wi-Fi at home.


Journey from 2003

Dr. Pravin Bhagwat, Kiran Deshpande, Samir Palnitkar and Jai Rawat bootstrapped to establish the organization in 2003. "AirTight was created based on a hypothesis rather than industry pain points or predicting the pain points. Anticipating that Wi-Fi will grow in enterprise where security, manageability and monitoring will be key, technology was built to address these. It is like hedging a bet smartly," says Deshpande. After building a prototype of Wi-Fi monitoring and security, the company raised venture financing in 2004. Since then the company has taken a quantum leap, including market recognition by Gartner who gave AirTight "strong positive" rating in Gartner's 2011 and 2012 market scope studies. AirTight is the only company to receive this distinction.

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