What is Nortel up to?

Clarifying issues surrounding this emerging security architecture

In all the bankruptcy noise surrounding Nortel, it's easy to miss that the company has bought up the intellectual property of Identity Engines, whose portfolio adds up to a NAC package.

Nortel has a Web page that says it plans on introducing Packet Engine’s products in the first half of this year, which means sometime within the next three months.

The curious thing is that Nortel already has its own NAC bundle that it calls Secure Network Access, so the question is, what is Nortel up to?

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In all the bankruptcy noise surrounding Nortel, it's easy to miss that the company has bought up the intellectual property of Identity Engines, whose portfolio adds up to a NAC package.

Nortel has a Web page that says it plans on introducing Packet Engine’s products in the first half of this year, which means sometime within the next three months.

The curious thing is that Nortel already has its own NAC bundle that it calls Secure Network Access, so the question is, what is Nortel up to?

Secure Network Access consist of Secure Network Access switches that houses a policy engine that weighs endpoint health information and authentication to decide on whether a user gains access. It communicates with a number of network devices – switches, access points and VPN routers and gateways – to enforce NAC policies. The system comes with a client health agent that gathers information about the security posture of endpoints that it passes up to the switch.

Identity Engines has a product called Ignition Server that contains a policy engine and it also has an endpoint posture agent, similar to the Nortel model. It also has a guest-access application for granting access to unmanaged machines that is designed so non-technical personnel can grant limited access to visitors. Rounding out the package, Identity Engines has an analysis and reporting application for producing custom reports that can be useful in meeting industry and regulatory compliance requirements.

A spokesman for Nortel says it has nothing to say about what’s to become of Secure Network Access if the company starts selling the former Identity Engines products in the next few months. Stay tuned.

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

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.