Solutions for Corporate Access

Visitors to organisations, whether clients, auditors, technicians or maintenance, all expect to connect whenever they visit business premises. Providing Internet access to manage their emails, access corporate information resources or reading social networking feeds, is now a necessity and expectation for guests in today’s workplace.

However, with the prevalence of computer viruses, worms, Trojans etc, it is not considered best practice to allow guests to attach their computers directly to the corporate LAN. Access needs to be controlled by exposing Internet access through a DMZ or separate guest network. This requires inflexible hot desks that can only be used by guests or IT intervention to make the DMZ access available as when and where required. Many organisations therefore turn to wireless to solve the issues around this IT intervention by deploying a guest wireless network, although this in turn presents its own challenges in terms of access control and security.

As wireless is no longer bound by the walls and business hours of the organisation, controls must be put in place to prevent unauthorised access and also ensure visitors can only access the Internet and not internal IT resources. Similarly, there should be provisions in place to make sure visitors can’t take advantage of the guest network to download large files or impact the Internet performance of corporate users who are sharing the same connection.

Typically, these controls are implemented by a form of authentication which requires the maintenance of user credentials which drains valuable IT resources whenever a guest account needs to be created.

amigopod brings corporate grade security and auditing to guests and contractors through a simple and effective process. Instead of IT staff involved in the daily provisioning and management of guest access, amigopod enables reception staff to create, edit and manage all aspects of visitor accounts on the guests’ arrival through an intuitive and personalised web based interface or configure self provisioning captive portals with full customisation and reporting of data captured

Uniquely, designed from the ground up for non-technical staff, reception staff can simply create a guest account by completing a few details on the web based form. An account is created for the guest and their credentials can be either printed or sent via SMS to their mobile. The guest access can be limited or extended to any time duration. Once the time has expired, the account is removed, the audit trail recorded and further access denied without a new account being created.