In addition to customary firewalls, Catopodis says there are other, more human-specific concerns that must be attended to. For instance, he never allows a computer to leave the office unless he's sure that a sales rep's machine will go into screensaver mode quickly and that it won't boot up unless there are passwords on hard disks.

"You've also got employee education and issues of occupation, health and safety," Catopodis says. "It's important that employees realize that just because they've got a wireless connection it's not okay to use the laptop on the seat next to you in the car while driving."

Catopodis measures how long people connect to the system and uses that and other metrics to help manage costs and understand how staff use the system.

"We thought it might be a project that would take a few months, but four or five months later we're still refining things," Catopodis says. One of those things Catopodis says the company is "cleaning up" is the billing information that comes from Telstra: "So that we get what we asked for up front," he says.

"The telcos sell their solutions in a certain way and you've got to learn a lot of things the hard way," he says. One example is contention-based broadband, which can lead to slow connections due to too many users competing for use of a particular tower. "There are a lot of things that you don't hear about from a marketing perspective, but when you get practically involved you start to learn what the limitations of the technology really are," he says.