“Data,” says Howard Schmidt, professor, and president of the international Information Security Forum, “is the gold, the silver and the diamonds of the world we live in, so no matter how someone gets access to your data – whether it’s through a lost piece of media or a wireless network, it’s just as dangerous and troublesome as if someone broke in and stole the entire computer system.”

This is why companies worldwide are worrying about the challenge presented by the growth of wireless networking. Richard Levine of Accenture, a consultancy, remembers how at one time the chief information officer mandated how an employee could connect to the network. “Today, they have expectations of how they want to connect and if you don’t give them the hardware and network to do it, they will find their own.”