Higher Education

Hi Gang,

 

I originally posted this in another area but didn't get any traction on it but there seems to be a lively group here and I sure could use some help. We are now in the process of formally creating a BYOD policy. Once this is established we can then push on to solving the BYOD management dilemma. So I am asking to see if anyone has already implemented an official BYOD policy and if you could share that with me so that we have a starting point.

 

Anything that can be shared is greatly appreciated!

Scott,

 

This is the Education part of this forum, but needs vary, depending on the type of environment.

Apparently, you are in a Community College (2 year college) environment. In my area, the college owns all computers.

I am in a higher education environment with student residences. Im my environment, the students own the majority of devices, so BYOD is not new. 

Unfortunately, I am not sure my experiences would translate well to your environment. We have a WPA2-Entterprise (802.1X) wireless network, using ClearPass Policy Manager as our RADIUS server. We have an open SSID for non-802.1X capable devices. The device must first be registered in ClearPass. We also have an Internet-only Guest wireless network.

 

What questions or concerns do you have?

Thanks for the quick responses!

 

Yes we are a two year Community College but we are the 5th largest in the state and average almost 10,000 students per regular semester on our two campuses, that doesn't include our web based students. Anyway, currently our wireless is completely segmented from our production network. However we know that it is only a matter of time before that changes, especially with the 4 new buildings we have going up.

 

So that being said, student users are not really the issue. It's employee/staff users that are wanting to use their personal devices to aid in instruction and or their jobs in general and there for access some of what's on the production network (I should state that this does not include our PCI lock down areas, they are strictly a BYOD no fly zone). Anyway, Instructors and some other staff have made some headway with the powers that be and we were told to start a committee and  find out what the employee population wanted and start developing an official BYOD policy.

 

And here we are! (lucky me)

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@americanmcneil wrote:

Thanks for the quick responses!

 

Yes we are a two year Community College but we are the 5th largest in the state and average almost 10,000 students per regular semester on our two campuses, that doesn't include our web based students. Anyway, currently our wireless is completely segmented from our production network. However we know that it is only a matter of time before that changes, especially with the 4 new buildings we have going up.

 

So that being said, student users are not really the issue. It's employee/staff users that are wanting to use their personal devices to aid in instruction and or their jobs in general and there for access some of what's on the production network (I should state that this does not include our PCI lock down areas, they are strictly a BYOD no fly zone). Anyway, Instructors and some other staff have made some headway with the powers that be and we were told to start a committee and  find out what the employee population wanted and start developing an official BYOD policy.

 

And here we are! (lucky me)

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We currently don't have any particular policies (BYOE) , the only requirement is that user needs to have a valid university credential to register the device (Mac address) in our netreg system and then user is able to connect to our open or secure wireless network either staff or student .

But If you have ClearPass you could apply policies to the employee/staff matching a certain criteria like for example AD Groups in combination with the type of device or you could use Onboard.

Being that the majority of our users are students, they are permitted to bring whatever they want so long as their device meets the requirements of our WPA2-AES 802.1X network. We have no such policy in place.

- Ryan -