* Should NAC be placed in-line with traffic or out-of-band?
The debate over whether to place NAC appliances in-line with traffic or out-of-band seems to be roughly a draw, based on a recent Infonetics report.
In its analysis of NAC appliance sales, in-line gear accounts for “almost half” the revenue and out-of-band accounts for 45%, Infonetics says.
The arguments abound on both sides and apparently have buyers split. In general, in-line NAC appliances are better for smaller deployments because as the size of the installation grows, so does the number of devices. Out-of-band scales better.
This study measures how much money is spent on each option, so it doesn’t reveal the size of individual deployments. But it does indicate that buyers are finding compelling reasons on both sides of the argument.
Infonetics does, however, say that the size of deployments is increasing, just as the time it take to close a sale is decreasing. This makes sense as potential buyers become better educated on the technology and have more confidence it its usefulness. Earlier, more sales were likely directed to targeted implementations rather than broad deployments.
Jeff Wilson, who wrote the report “NAC Enforcement Appliances Market Outlook” predicts that the size of each sale will increase somewhere between double and quadruple between the third quarter of last year and the third quarter of this year.
Since the last report on NAC appliances, the main reason people are buying remains the same: they find NAC useful for addressing some aspect of regulatory requirements that demand tracking device and user activity on networks. NAC can supply some of that information as well as mitigate the risk of bad behavior that devices pose when they are admitted.
North American businesses account for two-thirds of the spending on NAC appliances, the study says.
