Cisco Cisco Wireless Control System Version 4.0 White Paper
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White Paper
Achieving Business Goals and Enhancing Customer Relationships
with a Secure Guest Access Wi-Fi Network
with a Secure Guest Access Wi-Fi Network
This paper explains why wireless LANs are the best way to enable a guest network and describes how to enable guest
networks without compromising internal security.
SUMMARY
Many enterprises are interested in providing access to the Internet for their partners, vendors, consultants, or other visitors while maintaining
security of their own wireless and wired networks. Assisting visitors with access to IT resources while they are on the premises can have many
benefits. For some enterprises, providing access to IT resources is a simple extension of hospitality to visitors—an assumed service, much like
providing coffee. For other enterprises, providing guest access is crucial to business goals and improving the bottom line. Examples of some
useful applications of guest access in different environments include:
•
Education and hospitality— Making a research or conference center more attractive to prospective customers
•
Retail, healthcare, and government—Allowing suppliers and vendors to automatically update inventory positions or place refill orders
while on the premises in order to minimize stock shortages
•
Retail—Increasing customer loyalty and/or spend per visit
•
Enterprise—Enabling consultants to complete audits more efficiently
Whatever the business reason for guest access, it’s critical to maintain the security of your enterprise as you implement guest networks.
Your implementation and security goals should include the following:
•
Ensure that guests have access only to the Internet, not to internal resources.
•
Create no additional burden for IT administrators to individually authorize users.
•
Use existing infrastructure.
•
Ensure that internal users and applications have priority over guest users.
•
Monitor use of the network and prohibit services on a location or per-user basis, as required.
This paper discusses how you can quickly and securely install guest access networks using the Cisco
®
Unified Wireless Network.
THE CHALLENGES OF GUEST NETWORK IMPLEMENTATION THROUGH A WIRED NETWORK
Providing guest services over a wired network can pose significant challenges. For larger enterprises in particular, what seems like a simple request
to provide Internet access can turn into a major drain of resources and time. To maintain internal corporate network security, guest traffic must be
restricted to the appropriate subnet and VLAN. Reconfiguration of the access switches that serve conference rooms, offices, and cubicles where the
network is needed can involve many IT staff hours. In addition, providing a wired network connection to some places within the enterprise may be
very expensive or not feasible. Bringing wired access to auditoriums and large conference rooms is particularly challenging as the rooms have not
typically been designed to bring Ethernet cabling to each seat.