Cisco ISE and SAP Afaria: Be productive on and off the Network

Reduce the barriers to mobile productivity while making sure the corporate network is secure. Impossible? Seems like it. But that’s what the business continues to demand.

SAP Afaria support for Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) is a key component of policies based on conditionality that attempts to negotiate the gap between employees who want to use their own mobile devices and good security practice. Employees want to and should control their personal devices. But they also want to use those devices for email and to access services on the corporate network. So while it is true that the employee can install any software on their device, they should know that only compliant devices can get email and access to the corporate Wi-Fi network. In some circles, this is known as “carrot” (do not install apps that put corporate information at risk) and “stick” (if you do, email is blocked on that device and no access to the Wi-Fi). The value to IT is that the enterprise network has an additional level of security – only mobile devices that are under management and deemed compliant are granted access, period.

In addition, now that you have ISE and SAP Afaria working together, you can answer questions like what percent of Afaria managed devices connect to the Wi-Fi network on an average day? And how does that vary between Boston, Brussels and Bangalore?
IT Managers and Administrators are looking for a single, holistic view into the compliance status of network identity across all regions with detailed visibility into all kinds of devices management information. They are looking for immediate insights into non-compliance devices trying to connect to network with drill down capabilities for root cause analysis of each kind of non-compliance devices.

SAP HANA running on Cisco UCS solves this by giving enterprises the ability to capture high volumes of data from all required external/internal sources – Afaria, ISE, HR systems, Microsoft System Center, etc. HANA brings together the ecosystem of technologies that provide different business controls, including app management, mobile identity and access management and mobile analytics. Customers can then generate real time analysis of Compliance trend/Posture Compliance across regions and types of devices with rich reporting & dashboard capabilities with great user experience.

To learn more go to www.cisco.com/go/sap