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August 28, 2014

User Access Policy Needs to Be in the Cloud

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

Internet access is pretty ubiquitous at this point; most of us jump across multiple Wi-Fi networks in the course of our day. What’s not as ubiquitous is uniform access policy.

“In order to handle all that capacity you now need to bring it into the cloud,” Mads Lillelund (News - Alert), vice president and general manager for the Blue Socket Group at Adtran, told TMCnet during a recent interview at ITEXPO (News - Alert) Las Vegas, “It is the only place where you can manage such a large-scale deployment.”



Adtran basically manages all the networking and policies for the users and their devices on the network, ensuring that there is some uniform and centralized policy management.

For a school, for instance, teachers, students and staff all will need different access policies. Role-based policies are essential, and managing it all can only be achieved through a cloud approach, according to Lillelund.

That’s true for a school or enterprise. All organizations face this need.

“So if you have your employees, your sales people, they will have access to certain parts of the company,” he noted. “Your financial part will have access to some other things, you have guests or consultants coming in and you want to provide them the right access.”

Organizations will want to set all those policies at the cloud level so it is uniform across all the locations the organization has.

“That’s very important for global institutions and multi-state environments because you don’t want to set policies locally,” he said. “You want the policy across all sites.”

Managing policies at each site is a nightmare waiting to happen; it is far too easy for variance in policies at each location. But with the cloud, a single set of policies can be set and enforced.

The centralization that comes from managing Internet access in the cloud is made for this problem.

So as the cloud helps encourage people to spend increasing amounts of time tethered to their devices and the Internet, it also delivers the solution for managing all these people and devices with the right level of access.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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