Wireless has recently gotten a lot more expensive for large retailers. I am not talking about the actual costs of devices, but rather about the level of responsibility anyone who processes credit cards is going to have when anything “wireless” touches their network. Retailers have been deploying 802.11 devices for over 10 years, predominately in their distribution centers and more recently in their stores. The inventory applications that they run across the WLAN are mission critical and are valued in the millions of dollars on an hourly basis. Based on the success of these applications in the DC’s, retailers have quickly deployed wireless routers to their stores to run applications like POS, VOIP, and those same inventory systems.

Now with the PCI standard, retailers are being told that they have to do a much better job of securing these devices, the networks they are connected to, and just about everything else that involves credit card or customer data. I am sure most retailers would have thought twice about rolling out WiFi to their stores had these standards been in place 10 years ago. That being said, most of the WiFi infrastructure is already out there and is ingrained into the operations of the retailer and would be hugely painful to rip out. Retailers are going to be forced to do a much more thorough job of inventory and configuration management, use better encryption, and segment their network to keep all of this credit card/user data separate from everything else on their network. Management tools in general are going to be a big help to this industry in the coming months.