Great Bay's Sponsored Guest Access

Provisioning Guest Accounts

Great Bay's Sponsored Guest Access system allows authenticated users to create and manage temporary guest or contractor accounts for people requiring network access in networks that are secured by 802.1X and/or NAC. Sponsorship for network access can be provided by designated employees such as security personnel, administrative assistants, or any user designated as having such capabilities. The state of the sponsored accounts along with a record or who sponsored them, the contact information, specified duration, Cost Center of the sponsor, etc are all logged and stored so that a record of all guest or contractor accounts can be readily accessed.

SGA for People requiring guest access is currently integrated with the NAC and Authentication systems provided by Cisco and Juniper.

Endpoint Provisioning

In addition to providing the capability to sponsor temporary access for people requiring network access, SGA also provides the ability to sponsor connectivity for devices requiring network access because they either temporarily cannot or will never actively participate in the 802.1X or NAC enabled network. These machines commonly fall into one of 2 categories; the first of which is new devices being added to the enterprise and the second are devices that are currently incapable of achieving the level of network access required and must be given a temporary exception for network access.

In the first scenario, the network administrator has determined that new devices should not be added and dynamically provided with network connectivity without either passing authentication and NAC checks or via a sponsorship. Devices requiring a sponsorship before gaining network access include new printers, WLAN Access Point, VOIP Phones, and a host of others. These devices are added to the SGA sponsored devices list and are granted network access based on an employee providing his/her credentials and sponsoring their identity. This sponsorship is subsequently supported by Great Bay's Beacon Endpoint Profiler where identity of the device is continuously certified so that sponsored devices cannot be wrongly identified or have their MAC address spoofed.

SGA for Machine Provisioning is currently integrated with the NAC and Authentication systems provided by Cisco, Juniper, and Symantec.