Case Study: The City of Gastonia achieves centralized, secure multivendor RADIUS and faster troubleshooting with HPE Aruba Networking ClearPass Policy Manager

The City of Gastonia - Customer Case Study

The City of Gastonia, NC, faced an authentication and access-control crisis after its NAC vendor exited the market. Its small IT team supported 1,000+ users across multiple city and county organizations, with three Active Directory domains and several RADIUS servers that often failed to authenticate public safety users or county laptops, making wireless email and mobile reporting unreliable and troubleshooting slow and laborious.

Gastonia deployed Aruba ClearPass Policy Manager as a centralized, multivendor RADIUS and policy platform with native 802.1X support. The phased rollout and clustering delivered high availability and scalability, restored directory-aware, role-based access for wireless and VPN users, and greatly improved visibility and searchability of authentication transactions—cutting troubleshooting time roughly in half and unifying access policies across city and county systems.

The City of Gastonia

Robert Loveland

Network Engineer