To maintain a competitive edge, enterprises—large and small—must be able to open their network to visiting customers, partners, consultants and suppliers. It simply makes good business sense; unless of course, the guest user connects to your system with a worm-infected laptop. Or worse, they gain access to sensitive or confidential information and put the entire organization at risk.

To provide a mutually beneficial guest networking solution, it's important to adhere to the following criteria:

• Enable guest access to only select IT resources—such as the Internet—while protecting internal resources and intellectual property
• Deploy seamless wired and wireless connectivity across your facility, without compromising security
• Maintain granular control down to the port and user level to respond more quickly to changing conditions

Enterasys Secure Networks™ architecture provides the most effective solution for safely bringing guests on to your network. The key is the embedded security found in every component of the Secure Networks infrastructure that recognizes users (and their roles) at the point of entry and ensures the fastest adds, moves or changes.

• Partners, suppliers and contract employees require varying levels of network access
• Using NetSight® management, IT defines and applies policies for guest users, then distributes to Matrix™, SecureStack™, and RoamAbout® devices
• Matrix and SecureStack switches as well as RoamAbout wireless granularly police traffic at the point of entry
• IT can alter and re-distribute policies across the network in accordance with guest user requirement changes—all with a single click
• Centrally defined and globally distributed policy enables guest mobility throughout the enterprise

• Fastest detection, location and response capability
• Most pervasive deployment of network security functionality
• Most precise security enforcement—pinpoint control
• Only open architecture in the industry—leverage what you have today with no “rip and replace”
• Greater automation for simpler operation
• Fewer products to deploy and manage
• No performance trade-off for advanced security capability
• Flexible architecture dramatically reduces solution-time required for future issues
• Best total cost of ownership in the industry