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Wireless LANs have gained increasing market popularity in locations such as airports, cafés, universities, and businesses, but WLAN security remains an ongoing concern. The rapid deployment of WLANs has further emphasised the security vulnerabilities in the 802.11 standard which, in its initial deployment suffered from a number of security limitations. However mitigating these vulnerabilities implies an impact on network performance. In this paper, we investigate the network performance of WLANs when security technologies designed to improve the 802.11 standard are implemented. In particular we evaluated the performance of the 802. IX and VPN models including the various security configuration levels offered by each of these models. Experimental results indicated that the performance of various applications operating over the 802. IX security model performed better than over the VPN model. However each of these models offer a wide range of configuration options and operating conditions. These are analysed and the results discussed in this paper.