Need Of The Hour: Secure, Smart & Intelligent Network

PCQuest, in association with Aruba and Ashtech, held a webinar on the Secure, smart & intelligent network. It was well-attended, informative and the participants gave interesting talks about the need for a secure network, especially during the Covid-19 endemic crisis

Sunil Rajguru, Editor, PCQuest, said that the paradigms are changing. Network is the need of the hour. Business Continuity Planning is very important today. The network continues to be important for BCP. Most attacks still happen at the network layer, and cyber criminals are exploiting Covid-19 to do more of the same. The mobile force is also growing larger, along with the IoT devices, and the network is becoming smarter.

Mohan Singh Negi, System Engineer, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, said that the vulnerabilities to the network are constantly expanding. The IoT units installed base is also rising. An example is how a fish tank helped hack a casino.

The Aruba ClearPass solution allows visibility, control, and response. You know who is connected on your wired and wireless multivendor environment. You can see who is authenticated by you. It allows visibility, as to who and what is on your network. Profile is everything on the network. You can view the contractor, IoT, headless, employee BYoD, infrastructure, servers, data storage, internal applications, cloud applications, network infrastructure, visitor, administrator and employee. You can know what’s connected, real time, 24X7, agentless.

The control is automated, with authentication and authorization. The user can also view the device type/health being used across the network. This can be either of IoT, BYoD, or corporate. Enterprises can define who can access, such as files and applications. ClearPass extends that capability. Trust is enforced by dynamic segmentation. ClearPass has role-based policies as well as a policy enforcement firewall.

You can control compromised devices. ClearPass Policy Manager with OnGuard detects unsecure devices and minimizes risk to the network. It also supports the endpoint computers, featuring all Windows versions, Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora, SUSE, and Mac OS X.

ClearPass does a health check before a device comes on to the network. It also has an automated defense capability. It takes care of the user connects and download threats. The NGFW/IPS sends the event to ClearPass. ClearPass also isolates the client on the LAN/WAN.

ClearPass Exchange provides the end-to- end control. ClearPass Device Insight has been introduced. It provides AI-powered, advanced visibility. It reduces risk by eliminating the blind spots. It automatically classifies the unknown devices. It ensures secure access via seamless integration with the ClearPass Policy Manager. There is an automated closed-loop network security. Traditional profiling techniques lack device context. ClearPass has ML-based clustering using DPI. ClearPass can eliminate all the blind spots in the network.

Sandeep Parmar, Ashtech Infotech, said that you need to have a long-term association with the industry. Ashtech has had 15 years of association with Aruba, and also HBC and ProCurve, so far.