* Colleges are proving one of the strongest markets for NAC
Peer-to-peer music sharing is one of the biggest friends to NAC as a business.
The technology for sharing files among endpoints is commonly used among college students to share music files, sometimes illegally.
Colleges and universities get many notices each semester from the Recording Industry Association of America complaining about students swapping songs and seeking help getting them to stop.
Schools say they face threats from their ISPs that their Internet service will be shut down if they don’t do something to stop the activity on their campuses.
Since NAC can determine what applications and types of applications are running on the machines it checks, NAC is a natural choice to remediate the problem.
If P2P apps are running, access can be denied until they are shut off. Periodic checks after they are admitted can ensure that they don’t start up again.
Colleges have a big interest in NAC for other reasons as well. With hundreds or thousands of unmanaged machines coming onto dorm and campus networks each semester, they need a way to quickly find out whether they pose a threat to the network.
NAC can’t guarantee that machines it checks won’t infect the network, but they can make that less likely by making sure updated antivirus, anti-malware and personal firewalls are turned on. The alternative has been answering individual help desk calls when students’ computers get infected to the point that they’re no longer usable.
When this use of NAC is combined with eliminating P2P headaches, it’s no wonder colleges are proving one of the strongest markets for NAC.
