Do You Need Network Access Control? 10 Questions To Ask Yourself

Mobile devices are an indispensable tool in both our personal lives as well as our professional lives today. With an endless amount of new applications and devices coming out every year, employees, guests, students, faculty, administrators etc expect to be able to use their mobile devices to access the network from anywhere at any time.

With many IT departments being outpaced by user demand, they need an answer to help them keep up. 

It's a mission-critical task to allow access to your networks from mobile devices, whether they're owned by you or by your end-users (BYOD). 

IT manager's and their teams need the ability to: 

• Quickly and Efficiently On-board New Devices 
• Reduce their Workload Through Self-Service 
• Effectively Enforce Security Policies 
• Establish Granular Visibility of their WLAN by asking (Who, What, Where, When, How) 

With the right network access control solution in place you can successfully support the criteria above as well as go beyond access policy enforcement and support a richer, more dynamic user experience. 

However, the question still remains, how do you know if your enterprise wireless network actually needs to implement network access control?

To help you make the right decision, here are 10 simple questions from Aruba Networks you need to ask yourself to determine if an NAC solution is right for your business or organization. 

Question 1: Security Breach

Has your business or another business in your same industry recently suffered a security breach? 

Question 2: Mobile Devices

Are a large number of your end-users (employees, guests, students etc.) using mobile devices? 

Question 3: Partners

Do you hire contractors, or work collaboratively with partners/agencies? 

Question 4: Guests

Do you have frequent and large numbers of guests on your environment? 

Question 5: Office Space

Do you have distributed offices? 

Question 6: Moving

Are you planning on moving into a new building, or consolidating sites? 

Question 7: Merger

Have you recently been or are you about to be involved in a merger or acquisition? 

Question 8: Sharing Resources

Are you a public sector organization that is being encouraged by the government to share resources? 

Question 9: New Regulations

Are you in an industry where new regulations or legislation have recently been or are about to be introduced, which relates to information security or operational risk? 

Question 10: Multi-Vendor Network

Do you have a multi-vendor network? 

If you answered "YES" to one or more of the questions above, it's probably time to seriously consider deploying a network access control solution, if you haven't done so already.