As mobility continues to evolve and expand, business transformation is really just starting. Many organizations are having trouble blending new mobile and 
adaptive technology with the legacy systems that have been in place for many years. In many cases employees are now moving faster than IT and personal devices are invading (and being accepted) in workplace environments.
As a result, some new pain points are emerging—mainly device on-boarding and lack of visibility or control of the ever increasing number of mobile devices coming onto corporate networks.
Allowing employee-owned devices on corporate Wi-Fi
Due to the evolution of mobility and BYOD, the need to secure and have some sort of visibility over employee-owned devices that are used for both personal and business purposes in the workplace has arisen.
Because personal devices in corporate environments can increase productivity, IT has been tasked with supporting personal devices and maintaining business systems at the same time. We need to enable IT to scale and support BYOD by setting up self-service workflows to offload some of the burden to employees and create automation to increase ease-of-use, avoid mistakes and minimize help-desk calls.
So luckily, we at Aerohive can enable “mobile productivity” by deploying an infrastructure that facilitates productivity. Aerohive’s ID Manager leverages the cloud to simplify and automate the deployment and maintenance of enterprise guest management and employee BYOD programs. By combining Aerohive’s Cloud Services Platform with industry-leading authentication, we have eliminated the need for any additional hardware or software to deliver a scalable, simple-to-administer enterprise guest and BYOD management solution that streamlines the on-boarding of devices. So whether required at a single site or over a globally distributed, multi-lingual company, ID Manager’s cloud-enabled flexibility and simplicity provide a complete solution for every site.
How ID Manager and PPSK help manage BYOD
Now let's take a step back and look at an example. Say your organization has legacy devices that do not support 802.1X, or require fast roaming and do not support 802.11r, or you don’t want to deal with certificates as that will complicate a network pretty quickly.
In this situation many of our competitors would use legacy pre-shared keys. All users share the same key; if a user leaves or if a PC or portable device is lost for security reasons, the shared key should be changed and every client will have to update the keys on their wireless clients. And this means that all users share the same network policy. Since all users share the same SSID with the same key, they will also have the same network policies, such as their VLAN, because IT has no way to uniquely identify users or types of users.
However, using Aerohive’s ID Manager , we can ensure a more secure network without bogging down the IT team.
Private PSKs are unique pre-shared keys created for individual users on the same SSID. Client configuration is simple, just enter the SSID shared key for WPA or WPA2 personal (PSK). No 802.1X supplicant configuration is required. It works with devices that do not support 802.1X/EAP. You can automatically generate unique keys for users, and distribute via email, or any way you see fit. If a user leaves or a device is lost or stolen, the PSK for that individual user or device can simply be revoked.
Please check back next week for the second ID Manager installment where we look at scenarios in which ID Manager is recommended.