Colin Vallance

The year 2020 saw significant business disruptions, which caused many organizations to adopt new technology strategies, repurpose or resize infrastructure, and honestly assess the suitability of existing solutions moving forward. Amid all this introspection, one general theme seems apparent: Automation should be a key component of any business strategy not only in the office but…

Darin Burleigh and Will Kerr also contributed to this post. This summer, with support and guidance from our partners at Cisco, coworkers from CDW came together for a friendly Meraki hackathon. Over the course of two days, each of the four teams worked on designing and implementing applications based on Cisco Meraki wireless technology. Learn…

This past April, the FCC adopted new rules for the 6GHz band (5.925GHz – 7.125GHz), freeing up 1,200MHz of spectrum for unlicensed use. This new amount of spectrum was dubbed Wi-Fi 6E by the Wi-Fi Alliance in January to establish a common industry name to identify devices that will be able to use the 6GHz…

Distributed the laptops? Check. Wireless mice? Check. Warm, snuggly pajamas with your company’s logo? Check. Your organization is ready for work from home. Except… you need to also extend your network to support this workforce. That’s where the real struggle is: where the hard-working IT professionals are having to support a massive influx of remote…

On September 16, the Wi-Fi Alliance officially announced the Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 certification program. This is an exciting announcement in the world of wireless and will help usher more Wi-Fi 6 devices into the marketplace. For those unfamiliar with the Wi-Fi Alliance, it is a worldwide group of companies who work together to build sets…

The latest standard in Wi-Fi denoted as 802.11ax and branded as Wi-Fi 6 has been big news lately. Wi-Fi 6 promises a multitude of exciting new features that are set to be the most radical changes to the 802.11 spec that we know and love. The name of the game here is efficiency — the…

Part of my role as a wireless technical architect at CDW is keeping in touch with what's going on in the wireless industry. This means attending industry conferences such as Aruba Atmosphere and Cisco Live, where I get to absorb technical content, hear what's coming next, talk with our customers and partners, and frequently meet…

In my day-to-day life, I try to figure out little ways to become more efficient and consistent while solving the problems that are in front of me. In my personal life, these problems are usually more self-inflicted, such as creating customizable holiday lights or graphing fermentation temperatures for home-brewing. Professionally, this often looks more like…

In Part 1 and Part 2 of my blog series, I shared some insights into how attackers continue to exploit the weaknesses of WPA and the tools and techniques they are using to gain access to poorly secured networks. In the last post of the series, I will offer some suggestions for how organizations can…

In my first blog post on securing against Wi-Fi Protected Access vulnerabilities, I talked about the fact that attacks are still being developed to take advantage of weaknesses found in WPA/WPA2, which are known and have been around for a while. This post continues that discussion, getting into how exactly most attacks are carried out…

In early August this year, the folks behind the Hashcat password cracking tool posted a thread on a new attack against Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA/WPA2) using the Pairwise Master Key Identification technique. The attack differs from the traditional WPA/WPA2 attack vector in that it does not require the capture of a full Extensible Authentication Protocol…

A lot of people have been talking recently about the upcoming IEEE wireless standard 802.11ax. If you haven’t already heard about this next generation of wireless, several vendors such as Aruba and Cisco have already published detailed white papers to help you through the details. With the standard expected to be finalized sometime in 2019,…