East Grand Rapids Public Schools Deploys Avenda User Management Software

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/14/08

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East Grand Rapids Public Schools has selected a network access control system from Avenda Systems to provide identity and resource management across the district. The software manages who can log in into the network and what those users can access. The district has about 2,800 students and is located in western Michigan.

"We were changing a few things in our network over the summer," said Jeff Crawford, manager of networking and security at the district. "Avenda offered a very flexible solution that allowed us to incorporate the services that we needed most and phase in the remainder of the solution as our network came together."

Avenda's eTIPS platform requires no agent software on user machines and integrates with a number of networking and protocol environments, including 802.1X, RADIUS, Cisco NAC, and Microsoft NAP. Administrators can define policies for access control decisions and trust determination. It can identify and authorize users and devices that access the network using existing enterprise identity stores or a local store. Non-compliant devices can be quarantined and automatically or manually updated for compliance. The software includes a centralized dashboard that allows IT people to monitor user and device sessions and network policies applied to those sessions. The application also supports a guest-portal allowing administrators a simplified way to grant guest access to the network.