SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM) vs. Aruba ClearPass

It [SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM)] is well suited for small to medium sized companies who want to enhance and ease up their daily work. As well as it is suited for organized structures, it has its problems with very complex environments. For example, if you are working with direct and multiple permissions instead of having more granular group based permissions.

Incentivized

We have quite a few visitors to our campus and we don't want to have a set PSK for the wireless so we have configured a guest network where visitors can create an account and gain access to the internet and we don't have to "manage" it since the accounts will expire after a certain time. We have RF scanners in our warehouses and we want them to be allowed on the network and be put into its own VLAN. ClearPass can do this flawlessly by keying off of the MAC address when it comes online and putting it into the correct VLAN. This makes it so we don't have to add each device individually to the system. The only time ClearPass would not be appropriate is in a small deployment where the cost to value wouldn't make sense.

Incentivized

• SolarWinds Access Rights Manager is easy to set up and configure. We had the first report generated in a few hours.
• The automated feature for the reports is great. We just set it and forget it and now the reports get emailed on schedule.

Incentivized

• wide range of compatible devices
• have an easy-to-understand and hierarchical rule-writing structure
• easy-to-use interface and extensive documentation
• seamless MS AD integration

• Licensing model when we changed over to SolarWinds was [I feel] a nightmare. It needs to be more streamlined and SolarWinds needs to understand what their customers require. When we changed over to SolarWinds we found it very hard to get answers to what modules we were still licensed for.
• Our current system is not functioning. We can't login to the application with the accounts we created that were working. The error that appears doesn't help to resolve it. So at present we just renewed licenses for this year and we can't use the system.

Incentivized

• The user interface is outdated
• Support is not as responsive as it used to be
• I'd like to be able to build dashboards

Incentivized

It is in place and working. No time or money to consider anything else.

Incentivized

End user experience is much better than administration

Incentivized

Aruba Clearpass is straight forward in terms of day to day use for monitoring and basic user connectivity issues. The system is very robust on the back end, therefore some larger configuration changes may not be the most intuitive. System upgrades and license management are not the most intuitive either.

Incentivized

On occasion the server will need to be restarted to get things running again

Incentivized

Satisfactory performance

Incentivized

Very slow response times and sometimes I found the solution and ended up sharing it with support

Incentivized

We had some issues with ClearPass integration with AirGroup on Aruba Controller Clusters. Basically, it was tough to get coordinated between the controller support and the ClearPass support.

Incentivized

It was my first exposure to this type of product and I wasn’t given the time to figure out how best to implement it. I would say get a plan together of what you are tying to accomplish first

Incentivized

I found the installation and configuration to be much easier and more straightforward. What also assisted in the decision to go with Access Rights Manager, was the fact we already made use of Solarwinds products. Knowing from previous experiences with their support staff, meant we knew how great their after-hours support was whenever we had any technical issues with the platform. We felt it would be better to keep it all under one roof so to speak

Incentivized

From my experience, ClearPass has been the best NAC server of all I've seen. Even though configuration is somewhat hard and it's hard to get training, once you learn how to configure it it works very well. The policies are very granular and scalable and the interface is a well-done web GUI that does not need any extra plugins installed, as some of Cisco's product require. There are many more options than with FortiNAC, and many more integration options. Also, troubleshooting and logging is good.

Incentivized

No experience with this

Incentivized

• Team leads recieve automated reports of permissions within their team, and it allows them to proactively audit their team members
• Security specialists have really clear dashboards to audit individuals
• We can be sure we never leave a permission open after a person leaves

Incentivized

• It has simplified our SSID management
• It has made it very easy for us to segment our network based on security groups
• It was relatively easy to implement with the support of a VAR

Incentivized