College uses NAC to avoid P2P subpoenas

Clarifying issues surrounding this emerging security architecture

A college reports that NAC is delivering a new type of cost avoidance that is helping to pay for its NAC deployment. By discovering and controlling peer-to-peer file sharing of music and video with its NAC gear, the school has also cut back on the number of subpoenas it gets from music industry groups upset about pirating copyright material. At a cost of $1,200 each just to respond, that is a savings that can add up.

Since installing NAC before the start of the fall semester, the school has received no subpoenas at all from the Recording Industry Association of America, the watchdog group protecting music copyrights.

This information came out as part of an Enterasys case study on NAC presented at a Network World IT Roadmap session held in Washington, D.C. Details of the presentations for the session are available here, where you’ll have to create an account with a user name and password. There’s no questionnaire, so it’s pretty fast. Then choose Washington, D.C. from the dropdown menu.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

A college reports that NAC is delivering a new type of cost avoidance that is helping to pay for its NAC deployment. By discovering and controlling peer-to-peer file sharing of music and video with its NAC gear, the school has also cut back on the number of subpoenas it gets from music industry groups upset about pirating copyright material. At a cost of $1,200 each just to respond, that is a savings that can add up.

Since installing NAC before the start of the fall semester, the school has received no subpoenas at all from the Recording Industry Association of America, the watchdog group protecting music copyrights.

This information came out as part of an Enterasys case study on NAC presented at a Network World IT Roadmap session held in Washington, D.C. Details of the presentations for the session are available here, where you’ll have to create an account with a user name and password. There’s no questionnaire, so it’s pretty fast. Then choose Washington, D.C. from the dropdown menu.

Another interesting aspect of the college deployment (Enterasys didn’t reveal the name of the school) is that it’s a Cisco shop, but it deployed Enterasys’s NAC Appliance as an inline protection between the edge and core routers.

The NAC gear has been configured to give professors authority to impose access restrictions to the wireless network that is available in their classrooms. Typically the professors use the NAC gear to block instant messaging, access to e-mail and access to the Internet while they are lecturing. At the same time, more academic network resources can be available.

More from the IT Roadmap sessions next time.

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

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.