Secure Guest Access

Challenge

Guest Users

In today’s open and collaborative computing environment, visitors, guests, contractors, business partners and other non-employee staff expect to receive some level of access to your network. Whether it’s internet-only use, restricted admission to certain records or information, or full rights to all network resources, you need to decide who gets access to what.

To keep your network secure, you’ve taken the first step and determined the policies for each type of guest – from how much they can access to how much time they can spend on your network. But, how can you automate the provisioning process and automatically enforce the role-based policies that you’ve established?

Solution

The First Step – Locking Down Your Network

Before you can deploy truly effective guest access security, you first need to be able to distinguish your internally-owned and managed assets from guest devices that may appear on the network. This means having a system in place that dynamically checks every connection attempt on the network to determine whether the connecting device is recognized as an authorized device belonging to your organization. If not, the device should be considered as either a potential authorized guest, or else a potential threat.

Guest Management – Secure and Easy

Bradford’s Secure Guest Access solution set simplifies administration of guest access while ensuring network security by enforcing appropriate access policies for guests, partners, contractors, and other authorized external users.

Secure Guest Access starts by dynamically identifying non-employees and unmanaged devices when they attempt to connect to the network. Then, based on guest access policies you set, Secure Guest Access enables network access based on each guest’s role or relationship to your organization. You control where guests can go on your network, and you’re able to track where they’ve been.

Since provisioning guest accounts can put a significant administrative burden on IT staff, Secure Guest Access delivers a unique capability that allows IT to empower non-technical staff from other groups as authorized sponsors. Based on administrative profiles defined by IT, sponsors can set up user accounts without the need to engage IT staff. So, while IT retains control and network-wide visibility of all connections, sponsors are able to handle the day-to-day tasks of administering guest access accounts. The result: IT is happy. Sponsors are happy. Guest users are happy.

Added Security – Frisk Those Computers at the Door

You’ve established your own internal policies for anti-virus definition, OS patch levels, hotfixes, and required security software. What if you want your guest users to adhere to similar policies? Secure Guest Access includes comprehensive endpoint compliance assessment capabilities to ensure that all devices accessing the network meet your required security standards. Those that don’t comply can be allowed limited network access in order to remediate issues without having to engage your help desk.

Fast and Easy Conference Setup

Setting up individual guest access accounts on-demand can be challenging enough for you, but large meetings and conferences can add exponentially to the task – unless, of course, you have Bradford’s Secure Guest Access. Groups of guest access accounts with unique usernames and passwords can be created with a few mouse clicks for ten, fifty, even hundreds of attendees. Each group can be assigned unique access rights such as start date, end date, time-of-day access limits, and more.

A Win-Win-Win-Win Proposition

Bradford’s Secure Guest Access provides benefits all around – greater productivity for visiting users, internal sponsors, your IT department, and your organiza¬tion as a whole. Users get quick and easy network access. Internal sponsors are able to get their visitors online without delay. IT staff are able to maintain control and visibility, while off-loading routine tasks. And your organization achieves greater security while increasing user satisfaction at the same time. That’s a “win” for everyone involved.

Resources

Whitepaper
Video

BYOD – How School Securely Opened its Network to Student- and Faculty-Owned Devices