Will Aruba’s Clearpass Device Insight Be A Lifesaver?
The sun has set on the days of the fixed workstation and laptop. We have splashed down into a wild and crazy sea of irregular devices—surrounded by everything from medical appliances to smartphones to wireless cameras and watches. In organizations such as schools, hospitals, and retail businesses, it can seem like an insurmountable challenge to keep track of all the IoT devices popping on and off a network. Aruba Clearpass Device Insight may help with this.
How do you manage the BYOD and IoT flood?
Is there a ceaseless onslaught of devices of all shapes and sizes floating onto your wired and wireless networks? Commonly, you may find you have blind spots. Your network can only see a partial view of an IoT device—that it is simply a “Windows” or “Linux” device, for example. If you don’t know exactly what and who is on your network, that’s a problem, putting your network and your company at risk of both security and compliance violations. This is not a theoretical problem. 8 out of 10 organizations today report having experienced an IoT-related security breach. This one problem multiplies fast, leading to a decrease in the effectiveness and efficiency of your network infrastructure and a long, unending headache for your IT team.
Fine tuning the Aruba Clearpass toolbox
Aruba’s Clearpass solution has always been at the forefront of BYOD access control and visibility. This latest advance improves upon an already excellent product. Clearpass Device Insight gives you a granular view of your entire infrastructure. See everything. In detail. Using data collection and deep packet inspection techniques, Clearpass goes beyond simple tags like “Windows” or “Linux” device to learn additional specifics such as vendor, hardware version, applications used, resources accessed, IP addresses, and more.
Not only can you “see” all the details, but Clearpass Device Insight is also “fingerprinting” each IoT device on your network, using its unique contextual and behavioral patterns to identify that device and immediately recognize it later on.
Aruba Clearpass Device Insight syncs up seamlessly with Clearpass Policy Manager, so you can move beyond identification to access control. Once a device is identified and classified, any set of custom policies can be applied to restrict its access. It’s the digital version of a red flag. Troublesome behavior can be quarantined. What’s more, this whole process can be automated so IT doesn’t have to intervene directly on every rogue IoT device that appears.
Harnessing the power of the cloud
Another key change unveiled with the introduction of Aruba Clearpass Device Insight is its cloud-based management. This makes implementation and deployment easier and faster. It also allows all customers to take advantage of Aruba’s aggregated data.
Current customers are leveraging the clearpass device insight “fingerprinting” to identify their devices and log them in the Aruba database. This information can in turn be used by your team, harnessing the power of this knowledge-base, to quickly and automatically identify similar devices in your environment. Clearpass Device Insight is learning and improving all the time to identify more hardware for customers.
When you feel like you are drowning in the middle of a rising sea of unknown IoT devices, Aruba’s Clearpass Device Insight may be just the lifesaver you need. Knowing exactly what is on your organization’s network at any time is not only smart and safe, it’s reassuring for your IT team. They can go back to other rescue and recovery operations!
