Network Access Control Technologies and Symantec Compliance on Contact
NAC solutions require multiple enforcement methods and policy flexibility to cover the entire enterprise network. As an innovator in NAC solutions, Symantec provides the most comprehensive and flexible set of options for deploying NAC to best fit your enterprise needs. Read this paper to learn more about the theory behind Symantec’s technology.
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The Essential Elements of Comprehensive Endpoint Security
Description: For today’s computing environments, there is little question that endpoint security is a required component of an overall enterprise security strategy. Read this paper is to clarify the various aspects of the endpoint security problem and to identify the functional requirements of a comprehensive endpoint security solution.
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Internet Security Threat Report
The Highlights of this volume reveals the security threat environment continues to be populated by lower-profile, targeted attacks as cyber criminals identify new ways to steal information or provide remote access to user systems. This report offers analysis and discussion of threat activity, including: Internet attacks, vulnerabilities, malicious code, phishing, spam, security risks, and future trends.
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What you need to know about NAC

Open-source options

Certainly, some of the basic roots of NAC can be traced to open-source initiatives, and there are several open-source systems available with varying features. While NAC technology is established in the mainstream commercial market, an open-source option may be ideal depending on needs and the policy that the NAC system will enforce.

As a general rule of thumb, commercial systems have more features than their open-source counterparts, and they come with a greater level of support. But that's not always the case. And it doesn't mean that open-source offerings should be neglected. Several open-source systems have sophisticated detection, authorization and quarantine abilities.
Implementing open-source NAC systems requires patience and usually at least competent Linux administrator skills. Such implementations are usually built upon other open-source packages, can be installed on many Linux distributions and often have limited documentation. For example, my first attempt at running one open-source system failed because I had incorrectly configured a dependency package, not the open-source NAC software itself.

Why go with open source, then? If there's an open-source offering that has the features you need, and the technical aspects aren't overwhelming, the costs of deployment are substantially less. Furthermore, although traditional vendor support may not be available, in some cases there are third-party companies that provide support, and often the developers themselves are available to answer questions.

Bottom line

The NAC market continues to rapidly expand to meet the goal of providing secure network access. An excellent source for further information on NAC vendors, open-source systems and trends is the Internet2 consortium's Salsa-NetAuth working group Wiki.

The question isn't whether or not you need NAC technology on your network, it's what type of system works best in your particular situation. NAC hasn't become a prominent buzzword in networking without reason. With security and privacy concerns of networked resources at an all-time high, NAC is here to stay. How you implement it, however, could pay silent dividends or cost public losses.

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