Network access control: Hot technology for 2009

Network access control has been a hot, fun topic for the past couple of years.

Epic standards battles pitted Cisco against Microsoft, each having its own terminology and approaches. And who could forget the Trusted Computing Group, which, with its own architecture, acted as a wild card?

Then there was the horde of third-party vendors offering to handle a company's NAC needs if it didn't want to wait for Cisco and Microsoft to deliver on their promises.

Last year was a turning point for NAC, however. The standards battles appear to have been resolved, and everything looks like it's falling into place. Customers apparently decided to wait for Microsoft to deliver its NAC products - and that left many third-party vendors out in the cold. A lot of them went under, including Caymas Systems and Lockdown Networks.

And because Network Access Protection (NAP, Microsoft's version of NAC) comes with Vista and Windows Server 2008, deciding to go with Microsoft has become a no-brainer for many customers. NAP represents a clear choice, rather than a technology that requires extensive research, RFPs, product tests and evaluations, and so forth.

NAP even proved itself in a recent product evaluation Forrester Research performed to determine which NAC tools would solve real-world deployment problems. Microsoft came in first, followed by Cisco and Juniper Networks.

This year the questions for customers will be where do we deploy NAC, and how many NAC features do we turn on? Most customers today are using NAC just to control guest access. That's important, but the technology can do more. On the pre-admission side, it can scan user devices, determine whether they are clear of viruses, check to see if patches have been updated and quarantine the device if security conditions aren't met. On the post-admission side, it can make sure that a clean machine remains that way, and that users access only those parts of the network to which they have authorization.

These important functions are ones that every IT exec should be implementing.

< Previous technology:Green IT | Next technology: 10 Gigabit Ethernet >