I want to invest more in our wireless security infrastructure. To justify the need, I can point to the effectiveness of AirMagnet Inc.'s Handheld Analyzer for tracking down unauthorized access points. With just one of these devices, we have been able to identify eight unauthorized access points at headquarters over the past six months. But this is a global company, and un-authorized access points probably reside in locations ranging from India to Ireland.

Next on my list is expanding our use of SecurID Authentication from RSA Security Inc., along with other configuration management tools, to ensure that our infrastructure remains within standards. We use a variety of vulnerability assessment tools that consistently reveal poorly configured routers, unsecured applications and servers that aren't installed according to policy. These tools provide data that will help me demonstrate certain ongoing weaknesses in our environment.

I don't have space to run through all the items on my wish list, but one of my personal goals for the security department this year is to develop a dashboard that will let us quickly see our current security status based on information that's gathered by many of the tools we already use. Such a dashboard would make it easier to implement changes, show return on investment for our security infrastructure and monitor for trends.

Here are some of the sources of information that would be fed into the dashboard:

Secure Computing Corp.'s SmartFilter, which has been placed on our caching servers to block categories of traffic that are against company policy, such as pornography, gambling, hacking and hate sites.