Controller-less WLANs

October is Cyber Security Awareness Month and while the focus seems to revolve around securing the end-user, I want to share some thoughts on how you manage your network.

The buzz is currently SASE - Secure Access Service Edge, and SSE - Secure Service Edge to help secure your user's traffic. One foundational component of these technologies is ZTNA or Zero Trust Network Access.  For those who don't know, this is the dream security technology where regardless of where a user is connecting from - be it from home, on the road, in the air, or in the office; their connectivity is securely transported while authentication of the both the user and the user's device is at play. This is great for access to cloud based applications, apps that reside in the data center, as well as apps in the cloud.

What often get's overlooked is HOW we manage our networks and connectivity.  With the proliferation of software defined networks and web portals to handle our management control & configurations, we admins sometimes get lazy and expose these portals to a less secure network.  Sometimes these portals and tools are exposed directly to the Internet.  From a security perspective, this is a bad idea!

Recommended practice is to restrict these management portals and management access to a set of known hosts or single layer 2 network segment. While this is more secure, it certainly makes gaining access to these resources more difficult... especially if you are not on the corporate network.

So, now we look at how technologies like ZTNA can help maintain our security posture & follow recommended guidelines and combine them with the ease of being able to connect to these resources from anywhere.

In the video, I'll give you an example of how you can protect your HPE Aruba Networking SD-WAN management interface with ZTNA. This methodology works for nearly any application and can even handle connections like remote desktop and SSH!

What actions have you taken to help secure management access?  Share your methods in the comments (but please don't expose any critical info!)

If you would like to learn more about HPE Aruba Networking products including a test-drive of the ZTNA solution in the video, give one of our Test Drives a whirl!