"Guest access provides an on-ramp to the corporate network that most organizations have failed to lock down and control, putting critical networked resources at risk. SmartPass creates a whole new standard for safe, secure, easy-to-use guest access over wireless," said Jim Vogt, president and chief executive officer, Trapeze Networks. "With this new solution, enterprises for the first time can efficiently and effectively mitigate the risk of network misuse by unauthorized users, resulting in the safest, most scalable approach to deploying and managing guest access."
Current guest access solutions are cumbersome to use, offer limited functionality, and are not scalable. As a result, most enterprises have defaulted to the easiest but least safe solution: they create a virtual public network on their wireless infrastructure that is openly accessible without any restrictions. This uncontrolled access to the public network exposes the enterprise to undue risk. For example, unknown, unauthorized individuals could use it as the host network for unlawful purposes -- such as launching denial- of-service attacks, distributing spam, or committing email fraud -- while consuming significant network bandwidth, resulting in reduced employee productivity.
SmartPass Delivers Total Control Over Guest Access
Unlike solutions from vendors such as Cisco Systems or Aruba Networks, which provide only limited control over guest access, SmartPass provides comprehensive controls over every guest user's access, the company says. Customers can restrict access by time of day, day of week, range of dates, and so on, as well as implement controls over bandwidth usage, quality of service, network resource access, security levels, and many other parameters. Access privileges and restrictions can be applied on a user-by-user basis, or profiles can be created and applied to different types of guest users.
Centralized Control and Management of Guest Accounts
Different from other solutions, which write each guest account to every WLAN controller's local database, SmartPass uses a centralized guest account database. While other solutions actually change controller configurations -- by adding, modifying, or deleting guest credentials on individual WLAN controllers throughout the network -- SmartPass never stores guest data to any WLAN controller. This centralized approach is not only cleaner and more efficient but also prevents potentially harmful configuration changes from being made to critical network hardware by front-desk staff with no domain expertise. It also ensures continuous, seamless guest access even in case of controller fail-over, or if a controller is taken out of service for any reason.
access, and the database can be backed up using standard procedures, enabling enterprises to audit guest activity across the network over any time period. In addition, SmartPass includes self-maintenance features, such as automatic de-provisioning and removal of guest credentials when they have expired. This is in contrast to other solutions that store guest data on every controller, requiring IT personnel to manually maintain and purge the data from each controller's local database.
Most Scalable Guest Access Solution -- Up to 10,000 Concurrent Guests
While other guest access solutions typically support only a few hundred guest accounts -- restricted by the space available on a controller to store guest data -- each SmartPass server handles up to 10,000 guest users. In addition, whereas other solutions only allow guest accounts to be created one at a time, SmartPass provides unique bulk creation functionality specially designed for large-scale uses such as conventions and for large enterprises, universities, and hospital campuses. The bulk creation feature enables customers to generate a large number of guest accounts quickly from an existing data source, such as an attendee list. SmartPass also provides an easy-to-use web API, making it easy to integrate with existing systems to determine guest privileges.
Easiest to Use-Perfect for Non-technical Personnel
In contrast to unwieldy solutions from other vendors, SmartPass software provides a highly intuitive, easy-to-use interface that completely shields front-desk personnel from the underlying complexities of network access control. Non-technical staff -- such as receptionists and event registration personnel -- can easily and quickly provision guest access accounts without any networking knowledge, while network operations personnel can set restrictions on the types of guest access that staff can grant.
Rapid Deployment and Fast ROI
The SmartPass application can be quickly and easily installed, configured, and up and running in just a few hours. As a result, SmartPass enables enterprise customers to deploy secure, controlled, and highly scalable guest access with virtually zero impact on scarce IT resources. With the efficiency and productivity gains that SmartPass delivers through its highly intuitive interface and features such as self-maintenance and bulk user creation, the application provides very rapid payback of the small investment.
