Introduction to Sign In

Looking for scope, requirements, roles, and licensing in one place? See the formal Sign In service description.

Sign In is the guest network, delivered from the cloud. It gives a visitor a branded page to sign in on, gives the venue a record of who connected and when, and hands the day-to-day work of approving guests to the people who actually meet them rather than to the IT department.

What it solves

Offering network access to people who do not work for you creates three problems at once: an administrative one, because someone has to grant and revoke it; a technical one, because the network has to separate them from everything else; and a legal one, because you are now processing personal data about visitors.

Sign In addresses all three from one service. Access is granted through the portal rather than by handing out a shared key, the guest is placed on the access the policy allows, and terms, retention and opt-out are configurable rather than improvised.

Beyond guests

The same service carries two adjacent cases that would otherwise need their own solutions.

BYOD. Employees connect their own phones and laptops through the same portal, with their corporate identity where the organization federates it.

Devices without a user. Screens, media players and other equipment are admitted by MAC address and whitelisted so they reconnect on their own.

How it reaches the network

Sign In presents the portal in the cloud and meets the network at the edge in one of four ways: a Cisco Service Gateway, a shared gateway for service providers, Cisco SD-WAN, or Cisco Meraki with no on-site equipment at all. Each is described under Implement the service.

Where to go next

• Captive portal: what the guest sees, and how their device is prompted to open it.
• Login modules: the sign-in methods, from one-click access to SAML.
• Self-Service portal: what a host or receptionist does day to day.
• Compliance and privacy: terms, retention, end-user reports and opt-out.