A five-point checklist for your secure guest access strategy

06 Jan 2012

Now that network access is considered a must-have by most people, a secure and reliable guest experience is expected by contractors, temporary workers and visitors when they visit other companies' sites, explains Chris Kozup, director of marketing at Aruba Networks, in an excerpt from his IP EXPO 2011 presentation.

Secure guest access is a major driver of network optimisation and investment right now. In an era of mobile device proliferation, when we all need to consume multimedia, to collaborate and to use cloud services while we’re on the move, user expectations are changing fast.

Today, we’re all consumers of technology and for all of us, wireless is a must-have. We want access anywhere – we almost view it as a basic right - and we want to use our own devices to carry out work-related tasks.

That’s equally true of contractors, temporary workers and visitors to our organisation’s premises – whether those premises are a hospital, an airport, a train, a retail location, a convention centre, corporate headquarters or a remote regional office. All these locations need to provide efficient, secure guest services, including wireless access - but that doesn't come without challenges. In fact, it places exponential pressure on IT teams, who will need to change a lot of the deep-rooted thinking about network design and access that they have followed for years.

For network admins, for example, there are issues like these: Do guests get the network shared WPA key? Do you type proxy details into guest browsers? Is IT’s help required for every instance of guest network access? Is there an audit trail for guest network activity?

Security admins, meanwhile, will have their own concerns. Network security devices may not at present be optimised for guest access. They’ll have to deal with devices from multiple vendors, using different platforms and browsers. There will be issues of integration and interoperability. And guest access may need to be audited for compliance.

How can the IT team possibly provide the overall guest experience that it wants to deliver, without compromising core corporate ideals around policy and security? At Aruba Networks, we suggest the following checklist for delivering a full-service guest experience. You’ll need a solution that is:

1. Capable of supporting any device. We don’t have the luxury today of limiting the service to Mac OS or Windows laptops.
2. Capable of supporting any network. Access trends are moving increasingly towards the wireless network but you’ll still have guests that require Ethernet access in certain scenarios. We need consistency.
3. Provides automation. As we look to deliver guest services, IT can’t scale. We need a way to automate some of the processes around account provision, so that IT personnel don’t need to be involved every time a guest logs on.
4. Can evolve to support a service that promotes brand-awareness, creates loyalty and/or drives revenues. In the next phase of guest services, we’ll want to deliver network access as a recognisable, branded product.
5. Supports compliance and auditing. The provision of guest access cannot be allowed to put the organisation or its information assets at risk. We’ll want full visibility into who creates an account and when. We’ll need to know from which locations a guest accesses the network and for how long. Finally, we need to be able to see how much bandwidth they use. 

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