GEC NEWS WIREAruba ClearPass Network Access Control (NAC) solution has been successful in enabling National Health Insurance Company – Daman to comply with governmental network security regulations and improving the Wi-Fi network experience for employees, contractors and guests.
As a semi-government entity headquartered in the UAE, it was imperative for Daman to comply with a new electronic security regulation. Implementing a NAC solution in their environment would be essential to achieving this. While the company’s previous wireless solutions worked conveniently, they presented their own concerns and risks which required a more comprehensive solution.
Daman began evaluating access control solutions from five market leading vendors and after a proof of concept, the Aruba solution was selected. Mr. Omar Almarzooqi, Manager, IT Security & Networks at Daman explains, “In addition to security which was the prime requirement, the solution needed to be flexible enough to work in a multi-vendor environment, and scalable enough to be deployed across our twelve large branches without adding complexity or management overheads.”
“Aruba completed the implementation in under a week which we found extremely impressive given the complexity of our IT environment. Aruba’s solution was more easily integrated and performed better than that provided by the competing vendor who had the experience of working on Daman’s network solutions previously.”
The insurance provider deployed two Aruba ClearPass Policy Manager 5K virtual appliances in its data centre and disaster recovery sites and ten further Aruba ClearPass Policy Manager 500 virtual appliance nodes in its branches. This resulted in immediate cost savings. Because there was no need for any physical appliances, Daman could maximize the utilization of Aruba’s existing servers by running Aruba ClearPass virtual machines (VMs).
Aruba ClearPass gives Mr. Almarzooqi and his team the ability to monitor and control network access across 12 locations via a single centralized dashboard. It has also through a self-registration feature enabled device provisioning for employees, contractors and guests without IT involvement, automating authorization for over 45,000 devices per week. This has enhanced and speeded up the on-boarding experience for end-users, reducing the number of helpdesk calls related to network access from over thirty per day, down to zero.
Security is further enhanced as ClearPass automatically vets devices prior to connecting them to Daman’s wired or wireless network, thus mitigating the possibility of endpoint vulnerabilities being exploited for an attack or data breach.
Daman has successfully leveraged ClearPass to introduce several new IT services. “The powerful features of ClearPass have made possible a host of benefits we did not even consider at the time of evaluation. After meeting and exceeding our expectations for NAC, ClearPass enabled us to implement Wi-Fi self-registration and onboarding, Wireless Security Policy Management, BYOD support and guest management,” beamed Almarzooqi. He and his team have already begun exploring ways to further extend their ClearPass utilization with particular interest in augmenting its security capabilities through integration with Aruba’s endpoint behaviour analytics solution.
“Aruba’s solution performs exceptionally well even in our complex multi-vendor environment and its powerful capabilities open up the possibility of leveraging it for many more purposes than we initially intended. We will continue innovating with this solid platform and are excited to grow our relationship with Aruba to enhance services for all stakeholders,” Almarzooqi concludes.
