Nice to see you, did you get a name tag at the door? By Rodney Thayer

Inviting people into your business is a well known process. In big businesses with big offices they’ll have a visitor management system at the front door. You get a nametag when you walk in. Folks who are there more frequently may have badges or keys. In today’s connected world it’s not only people in your office, it’s devices too. To operate a safe environment organizations often keep track of people (“person entities”.) These days it’s good to keep track of devices too (“non-person entities”.) Digital certificates is one technology that’s used to do this. Wireless and other environments use certificates to identify devices. That’s great, except now that your office is awash in ip-connected phones, watches, clothing, wastebaskets and fitness trackers that’s a lot of devices to install digital certificates on.

The industry has struggled for years in dealing with this. Early systems expected the user to handle the digital certificates necessary to secure network connections. This wasn’t practical. It didn’t make sense to teach all your users to become certificate installers. Automated protocols have been developed (and periodically adopted) to make this easier. The “Cloudpath Enrollment System” (Cloudpath ES) makes this easier to deal with. This solution facilitates user devices being enrolled in an enterprise environment. It’s meant to make the process painless for end users and so it contributes to ensuring your network is safer because you have more control and awareness of who’s using it (and whether they should be on your network.)

While this is a decades old problem, there are not a lot of solutions available today because until recently people didn’t perceive the need to put that much effort into securing their networks. It was always easier to write the guest wireless network password on the whiteboard in every conference room in your office. As times change and we care more and more about security, a solution to automate certificate enrollment has become appealing for enterprises and other uses. The downside of not using a solution like this is that you can have disorganization and insecurity in your network because systems have to be detuned to tolerate outdated credentials (because expired certs take work to replace,) password-based network access, or even unsecured networks (because stopping the boss from reading email in the conference room can be a problem.)

Cloudpath ES provides tools to securely “onboard” users and their devices. It includes self-service capabilities so users can provision their own company-issued or other devices. It supports digital certificates from an enterprise’ own internal Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) or using thrd-party services. It integrates with enterprise access management infrastructure components like RADIUS or Microsoft Active Directory so not only do you identify the devices you can make sure they are configured for proper access policies. It can be deployed by enterprise IT for business use, or for organizations that provide managed visitor access to networks. Cloudpath can help you secure your network by leveraging strong cryptography and digital certificates in a user-friendly manner that’s not a burden for your IT staff.