* The top obstacles to deploying NAC
The top obstacles to deploying NAC are the political and operational issues, according to a poll of attendees at a recent Gartner Security Summit.
According to the poll 35% had concerns about upsetting the wrong party if NAC hindered access or if it blocked access to too many workers at once, says Lawrence Orans, a Gartner analyst who wrote up the findings.
Placing a close second among users concerns, 32% feel that the technology is not yet mature enough to deploy with confidence. And a not-too-distant third issue, 27% cite the expense of NAC projects as an obstacle.
In the case of political concerns, Orans says potential NAC users don’t want to block C-level executives from gaining access and thereby turning them against the technology. They also don’t want to cut off an executive trying to gain access to complete end-of-the-quarter reports.
Operational problems include the likes of NAC finding so many machines out of compliance that a significant percentage of workers fail to gain access on a Monday morning, for instance, he says. The ensuing flood of simultaneous calls to the help desk could overload the desk and delay people from starting their workdays.
Orans says potential NAC users are worried about two kinds of expense. First is capital outlay for installing NAC appliances in a network or upgrading infrastructure to support NAC. The other is operational costs such as installing and updating NAC clients that check endpoints for compliance with policies, what he calls the yet-another-agent problem.
Overall, very few respondents have deployed NAC yet, just 6%. The vast majority, 77%, say they are in the planning stages, with 3% in beta tests and 13% with NAC partially deployed.
Orans says that most early adopters of NAC that Gartner deals with as clients still have the gear installed in monitoring mode, without trying to enforce policies until they have a handle on how wide an impact that would have on workers.
