Top reasons for delaying NAC deployments

Clarifying issues surrounding this emerging security architecture

Demands of regulators, lower prices and improvements in NAC itself could drive potential customers to purchase the technology even though at the moment they have no plans to deploy it by 2009.

According to a study by Infonetics, 80 corporate IT leaders cited the above as the top reasons why they were not planning to deploy NAC by 2009.

This was one of the results from “User Plans for Network Access Control: North America 2008,” which is based on responses from a total of 242 users.

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.

Demands of regulators, lower prices and improvements in NAC itself could drive potential customers to purchase the technology even though at the moment they have no plans to deploy it by 2009.

According to a study by Infonetics, 80 corporate IT leaders cited the above as the top reasons why they were not planning to deploy NAC by 2009.

This was one of the results from “User Plans for Network Access Control: North America 2008,” which is based on responses from a total of 242 users.

The study asked respondents to rank vendors based on how secure they felt their NAC products were, and Cisco came out on top. Juniper came in second. (Compare NAC products)

But Juniper came in first for perceived price performance ratio, which is based on what potential customers think rather than what the actual ratios are.

Security was the No. 1 reason cited for buying NAC, followed by protecting against data loss and increasing the overall corporate security posture. Another way of looking at those answers is that the top three concerns were security, security and security.

Despite this, according to the study, most of the respondents say they turn over day-to-day management of NAC to their networking teams, not their security teams. Since corporate security experts must clearly be involved in any NAC deployment, this calls for cooperation among various teams when selecting NAC vendors and deploying the technology.

For more on the Infonetics study see this item in Network World’s Cisco Subnet blog.

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

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.