Just returned from Vegas and boy did I hear the word “Lucky” a lot. It turns out that good fortune followed me home as our engineering and product marketing teams recently posted ClearPass 6.6 for general release. Congrats to all involved!
It’s great to see the addition of new features that target today’s growing wired and wireless concerns – improved device profiling, Internet of Things (IoT) visibility, responding to threats as they happen, reporting and analytics, and a new look and feel for our built-in reporting tool.
It turns out that better device profiling starts with capturing better infrastructure data. We’re now automating the discovery of LAN switches and WLAN controllers to quickly make ClearPass aware of the network and simultaneously increase visibility of connected endpoints. We’ve also added the ability to use WMI and SSH to gather more specific endpoint device data.
It seems lately that customers are experiencing an influx of devices connecting to the network. They lack the ability to clearly understand what they are which makes policy enforcement all the more difficult. Rather than being surprised by finding misidentified sensors, HVAC system controls or other specialty items on enterprise networks, ClearPass now provides the ability for IT administrators to define their own categories and fingerprints for these devices on their own. For example, if your engineering team invents or acquires a new sensor, it’s now easy to create a policy using a custom defined category for these new devices that keeps them on the engineering network and not on the production network.
One exciting new addition to our ClearPass Exchange feature set is the Ingress Event Engine. This enhancement allows us to directly take in syslog messages from firewalls, SIEM and other devices to make real-time policy decisions. Instead of just using a firewall rule to block suspect traffic, the firewall can now ask ClearPass to bounce the device from the network and trigger other events such as generating a helpdesk ticket or more importantly provide targeted messaging to the user using the detailed contextual information ClearPass has access to.
Today’s mobile and fast-paced user community generates a lot of data so our reporting tool, ClearPass Insight, has not only received a much needed facelift but also has a lot of changes under the hood. In addition to new user-friendly dashboard views and enhanced report options, we’ve also added the ability to create alert triggers that keep IT better informed about real-time connection events. Check back next month for a blog that touches on Insight further.
If you’re an existing ClearPass customer and under contract, version 6.6 is ready for download today!
Stay tuned for more in the next few months. Besides the features that I mentioned in this blog, there’s also a new integration with Juniper Network’s SRX firewalls, Multi-Factor Authentication solutions, new platform REST APIs, and much much more.
Thanks for getting to the bottom of this. Let me know if I should pester our engineers for more details.