Vernier’s EdgeWall

Cost: $45,000 for chassis, support for 1,000 users and one Control Server management appliance.

Score: 3.55

With little network integration required, Vernier provides standard assessment functionality for network-access-control with its EdgeWall product. But it also joins competitor’s ConSentry and ForeScout in the class of NAC products that includes an intrusion-detection system to monitor for malicious traffic flow at all times. Vernier's policy-development process offers an extreme level of flexibility. While that flexibility is necessary for large deployments, it can become overwhelming for the administrator.

In Vernier Networks’ NAC scheme, its EdgeWall appliance provides in-line assessment and enforcement functionality, while policy creation and overall management capabilities are driven by the Control Server, which sits elsewhere on network.

For testing, we deployed an EdgeWall appliance between the access and distribution layer of the test network to provide general LAN-based NAC. For remote access and wireless access, a similar in-line deployment would work, and the company claims support for 802.1X environments as well.

Vernier includes a captive portal for guest users that offers similar functionality to most other products tested. The portal is a standard Web page requesting user authentication and registration information. If an issue is identified on the endpoint, a page displays the assessment results, while a predefined message from the administrator typically provides information about how to clear up the issues at hand.

The management GUI has a clean presentation overall. Policy definition allows for a lot of flexibility but can get complicated to manage quickly. Vernier access policies comprise a series of profiles outlined as identity, connection and integrity profiles.

Say you want employees in the finance group to access only a specific group of servers. To achieve this, you would create an access policy to define what network resources the finance group can have access to. Next, you would create an identity profile for the existing finance Active Directory group that associates a security policy defining the types of assessments must run against the endpoint system.

The next step is to define the connection profile, which defines how to handle network access based on endpoint-assessment status. Profiles include out of compliance, compliance scan in progress and device scanned. For this example, we would use the default “Any” rule, because we are looking just at access for a compliant finance group user. As part of the connection profile setting, you define where the user authenticates. Next, you set up an integrity profile to define what patch compliance, vulnerability assessment and intrusion-prevention protections need to be performed. The last step is to add the entry to the rights table that creates the rule to associate the identity profile, connection profile, integrity profile and access policy with each other to create the full finance group policy.