Standards for NAC are still wending their way through the IETF, but don't hold your breath because they're not doing so at blinding speed, which is not surprising based on the history of how standards make their way through the IETF approval process. 

Recently the IETF made some headway in the proposed standard for client-server NAC protocols. There had been a lot of discussion about such protocols before the official call went out, and when the deadline for submissions passed, there was only one proposal.

That was viewed as a good thing by Steve Hanna, who is co-chair of the IETF group working on the standards. That means there will less to review and perhaps less controversy over the submission, meaning perhaps a quicker arrival at a standard.

The premise here is that standards will ultimately prevail and work to the advantage of businesses that buy NAC. It will make setting up NAC networks less complex and give customers more flexibility in choosing NAC vendors and the vendors that offer peripheral enhancements to basic NAC.

Trusted Computing Group has already issued its own informal standards that members agree to follow, but so far there have been very few TCG-standard-based NAC deployments publicized outside of Interop. The Interop demos are actually quite impressive, but real-world examples of implementations would be more impressive.

Since the IETF standard is the important one in terms of adoption, it's the one to focus on - Cisco is holding out for it and ignoring TCG. But even Hanna, who is big in both the TCG and IETF NAC efforts (as well as for his employer, Juniper) isn’t brimming with optimism about IETF standards coming soon.

“Standards are a complicated and delicate process of building consensus,” Hanna says in his NAC blog. “It looks like we’re headed toward consensus on these specifications, but it won’t be completely certain until years later.”

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.