Intelligent Control for Manufacturing Organizations

Manufacturing organizations must transact business with multiple vendors, partners, suppliers, and customers, which entails opening up their sites to various guests and business partners, many requiring access to the LAN or Internet. Manufacturers need to secure proprietary client data but also provide their guests and business partners with access to only the information they need. Intelligent control of users and applications is necessary, and needs to be implemented with sensitivity to a manufacturers' requirements.

Manufacurers must evaluate solutions that will provide them with complete control. The chosen product should be simple to use, manage, and deploy. In addition to a product that is scalable and cost-effective, manufacurers should focus on a holistic solution.

Key features of Intelligent Control of users and applications

• complete Network Admission Control (NAC) - user authentication, role derivation, and host posture assessment to ensure only valid users and devices enter the LAN
• improved application performance - Layer 7 identification, prioritization, and treatment of applications to protect assets and put business needs first
• complete user control - identity- and role-based policies to control access to applications and other resources
• faster troubleshooting - username, device, application, and resource tied together to accelerate incident response
• simplified compliance and audit trail - full documentation of all policies, as well as all LAN activities, tied to username and resource to speed audits

Key projects ConSentry can help address

• Enable role-based provisioning, so staff in different plants gain access only to the corporate data appropriate to their role
• Provide differentiated LAN access for guests vs. contractors vs. employees
• Protect offshore development sites from accessing sensitive internal data
• Secure and control file sharing in offshore sites
• Protect against unauthorized access from wireless LANs
• Deploy Network Admission Control (NAC) without a switch upgrade
• Limit or block “time waster” applications such as IM to improve productivity