A major vendor of NAC gear recently shared some of its marketing research on the condition that the company not be named, and it turned up some interesting data on who is buying NAC gear.

Of the vendor’s top 1,000 customers as measured by revenue, the largest group was educational entities. That’s not surprising because colleges and universities with large numbers of unmanaged devices - mainly student computers - need some way to check they have rudimentary protection.

The second largest group with 14% is government, also not too surprising because of massive new security and accountability requirements being dumped on them. This group is not mentioned often by NAC vendors in general.

There is a tie for third between healthcare and financial institutions with 9% each. Healthcare, with clinics and hospitals made up of affiliations of doctors, insurers and regulators that all need network access, is frequently mentioned as a big consumer of NAC.

Financial firms, always on the cutting edge of security technology because of the huge financial implications of breaches, are a likely group to invest in NAC. Their regulatory requirements, while they might not be met entirely by NAC, can be partially satisfied with the technology.

NAC expenditures by manufacturing businesses is nearly as high as for healthcare and financial sectors at 8%. These businesses interact with business partners for supply of parts and shipping, so need some mechanism for verifying that these unmanaged devices have appropriate safeguards in place.

One of the largest categories of customers of this vendor is “other” at 26%, made up of a variety of business categories that register less than 2% on their own. That shows NAC is also interesting to a wide range of other businesses depending on their individual circumstances.

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.