Carlos Gomez and Cameron Esdaile demonstrate Aruba’s security and policy controls

Carlos Gomez and Cameron Esdaile walk through a few use cases for Aruba Networks’ security and policy controls. They talk about visitor self-registration with sponsor approvals, BYOD for employees, pre-registration, and 3rd party integration for Wi-Fi devices.

In their Wireless Field Day 2 presentation, HPE Aruba’s Carlos Gomez and Cameron Esdaile demonstrated the capabilities of Aruba’s AmigoPod platform for managing secure network access and policy enforcement. They began by showing how guests can self-register for Wi-Fi through a captive portal that includes sponsor approval, which both automates provisioning and ensures network security. This process allows a guest to submit their details and receive approval from a designated sponsor (such as a host or IT help desk), with the workflow fully integrated through AmigoPod. The presenters highlighted how this mechanism supports a diverse set of environments such as hospitals where guest access is linked to patient check-in systems, thereby avoiding the need for staff training or manual provisioning.

The presentation then shifted to onboarding for employee BYOD devices, specifically showing how AmigoPod enables seamless installation of 802.1X configuration profiles on Windows laptops without requiring IT involvement. Using a dissolvable agent, users are guided through a fully automated workflow that configures the native supplicant for secure network access, including delivery of certificates and policy settings. This approach not only improves user experience but dramatically reduces help desk load—a benefit seen particularly in large-scale educational deployments. Additionally, the solution intelligently distinguishes user roles, applying differentiated access policies based on attributes like Active Directory group membership, such as providing unthrottled access to executives versus restricted rates for regular users.

Finally, the team walked through Aruba’s certificate-based onboarding for Apple devices using built-in MDM APIs, applying a similarly automated process to enroll iOS and macOS endpoints. AmigoPod acts as a certificate authority or can integrate into an enterprise PKI, enabling flexible policy enforcement based on endpoint characteristics such as device type and serial number. This contextual intelligence enables robust authorization decisions like distinguishing between corporate and personally owned devices on the same network. Aruba’s workflow-oriented design, device fingerprinting, and support for multi-vendor environments position it as a comprehensive, scalable solution for secure wireless access and BYOD challenges.