Networking & Wireless | News

Sinclair CC Managing BYOD with Enterasys Technology

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 11/13/12

Sinclair Community College, a long-time customer of Enterasys Networks, has implemented an identity and access management application from the company to support its bring-your-own-device (BYOD) program. The Dayton, Ohio institution sought a tool that could manage user policies for 28,000 students, faculty, and staff members at all of its locations, including its main campus and five remote locations. The college chose Enterasys' Mobile IAM for access management.

This application discovers and tracks about 50 attributes per user and device through the network to provide identity, access, and inventory management, as well as network access policy enforcement. Features include:

• Policy management that can be based on authentication type, device type, user, role, location, time, and assessment status;
• Auto-discovery of devices through multiple methods;
• Device profiling, including integration of information from external profilers;
• Multiple forms of user on-boarding; and
• Built-in guest access management through voucher, pre-registration, authentication, or sponsored access.

Mobile IAM is available as a physical appliance or as a virtual appliance that runs as a software image on a virtual machine.

"We don't want our students or faculty to worry about whether or not the network is working, and thanks to Enterasys, their focus remains on their studies," said Darnell Brown, the college's senior infrastructure engineer. "Plus, the Enterasys network allows us to be more flexible so we can say, 'Yes,' more often to network access requests, allowing us to create options for our students and faculty to complete their work."

"Sinclair Community College has been ahead of the BYOD curve and we wanted to get better," said CIO Scott McCollum. "The Mobile IAM solution from Enterasys had a lot of capabilities that we weren't able to do on our own, plus a road map that showed they put a lot of forethought into the BYOD space... We used to have other vendors' products--as well as Enterasys--to manage our BYOD program, but now our entire networking infrastructure is based on the Enterasys OneFabric architecture."

OneFabric is an approach introduced by Enterasys in 2011 to provide a unified view of network operations from a single console.

"One of the reasons we have been an Enterasys customer for so long is they allow us to be more efficient and in control of the network, rather than running around and putting out fires," added McCollum. "The number of devices we are required to support on our network is growing astronomically, but the stability of Enterasys equipment has allowed us to stay current with these growing demands. We trust Enterasys to help us continue this trend in supporting a successful BYOD environment."