How Equans upskilled a network engineer on Aruba access control (802.1X · ClearPass) in four days

Born in 2021 from the consolidation of ENGIE's multi-technical services activities, then joining the Bouygues group in 2022, Equans is today one of the global leaders in multi-technical services. The group designs, installs and operates the systems that keep buildings, industrial sites and infrastructure running — electrical, HVAC, automation, networks, security.

Equans supports its clients across the energy, industrial and digital transitions: energy efficiency, electric mobility, building management systems and connected buildings, process automation. That shift converges IT and OT — and puts the network at the heart of the value chain, across dozens of heterogeneous sites.

With more than 74,000 employees in around twenty countries, the group operates network infrastructure for both its own sites and its clients'. Securing access to those networks — which mix office endpoints, industrial equipment and connected devices — has become a prerequisite, hence the need to upskill on Aruba access control.

On many sites, network access still relied on a flat model: one port = one VLAN, with no authentication of the device connecting to it. Easy to operate, but untenable once you mix workstations, PLCs, cameras and sensors on the same infrastructure — a single compromised entry point exposes the whole segment.

The team made the call: deploy network access control (NAC) with Aruba ClearPass and 802.1X authentication, to identify every device and dynamically assign it a role and a policy. The challenge was as organizational as it was technical: roll sites over without breaking live operations.

To kick off that effort, Equans needed an internal technical reference able to frame the architecture, build a representative lab and roll the practice out to site teams. That key profile is the one Equans handed to Learni — with a clear bar: ship a tested access policy the very next week.

Learni designed a one-to-one four-day track, delivered on-site at Learni's Lyon hub, tailored to Equans's reality: a mixed device fleet (office, industrial, IoT) to authenticate without interrupting operations. The learner walked out with a working ClearPass lab — not a slide demo.

The trainer — a certified network engineer and hands-on NAC practitioner in multi-site environments — structured the course around a single thread: secure a typical site's access end to end, from ACL filtering to dynamic segmentation driven by ClearPass. Every concept landed at the moment it became useful.

By the end of day four, the learner had: a working 802.1X lab (wired and Wi-Fi), role-based ClearPass policies, profiling for non-802.1X devices (MAC Auth Bypass), and a phased cutover plan — from monitor mode to enforcement — ready for architecture review.

By the end of the four days, the learner walked out with a working ClearPass lab, role-based access policies and a concrete cutover plan for the first targeted site. Live satisfaction came in at 100 %.

Beyond the numbers, the value of the one-to-one format shows in the depth of the trade-offs resolved: it doesn't just cover a syllabus, it also settles the choices that would have stalled the team for weeks — handling supplicant-less devices, sequencing the cutover, planning the exceptions.