Alliances for better NAC

Clarifying issues surrounding this emerging security architecture

AEP Networks recently joined Microsoft's NAC effort. In addition, Lockdown Networks recently announced an alliance with four other companies to deliver a multifeatured NAC system.

These are just two very recent examples of companies aligning themselves with each other to come up with deployable products that go beyond the bare bones of NAC. Cisco lists 31 NAC partners shipping products today, and the Trusted Computing Group is based on establishing standards that allow vendors to create interoperable gear that when deployed together create a NAC architecture.

Anyone looking into NAC has to get used to this. Many vendors support a narrow piece of NAC, but need other vendors' gear to flesh out a useful deployment. Large vendors are no doubt working on their stand-alone schemes, but nobody is there yet, hence the cooperation.

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AEP Networks recently joined Microsoft's NAC effort. In addition, Lockdown Networks recently announced an alliance with four other companies to deliver a multifeatured NAC system.

These are just two very recent examples of companies aligning themselves with each other to come up with deployable products that go beyond the bare bones of NAC. Cisco lists 31 NAC partners shipping products today, and the Trusted Computing Group is based on establishing standards that allow vendors to create interoperable gear that when deployed together create a NAC architecture.

Anyone looking into NAC has to get used to this. Many vendors support a narrow piece of NAC, but need other vendors' gear to flesh out a useful deployment. Large vendors are no doubt working on their stand-alone schemes, but nobody is there yet, hence the cooperation.

In the case of Lockdown, the company signed on with Foundry for its switches that can enforce NAC policies, Lancope for behavior analysis of machines on the network, New Boundary Technologies for its security policy management and Safend for checking the security posture of devices that want to connect to networks. Lockdown brings its Enforcer appliances that can check endpoints and trigger enforcement commands.

NAC cooperation is a complicated landscape. For example, in addition to its newly announced alliances, AEP and Lockdown have a co-development relationship that started last summer to blend Lockdown's gear with AEP's SSL VPN gateways.

Barring the desire for implementing just those aspects of NAC supported by a single vendor, for now anyone looking to set up comprehensive NAC will likely have to buy from multiple providers.

Read more about security in Network World's Security section.

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.