* NAC's lack of maturity has it losing its appeal with large corporations
The largest corporations are drawing back from NAC until it is more mature, according to the latest security survey by TheInfoPro.
According to the study, the percentage of Fortune 1000-sized businesses with NAC in place has been dropping over the past 18 months from 35% to 26%.
“They said NAC didn’t work with their infrastructure, so they will wait until they upgrade their infrastructure to support NAC or wait for a different solution that works better with older infrastructure gear,” says Bill Trussell, TIP’s Managing Director of Information Security Research. “Rather than abandoning NAC completely, they say they are moved it into their longer term planning.”
TIP conducts surveys with 221 end users from firms with $1.4 billion or more in revenue every six months. Each user is prequalified and as part of their jobs make network planning, vendor-selection and purchasing decisions, Trussell says. Each interview lasts an hour to an hour and a half.
The firm tries to reach all the same respondents from one survey to the next, and gets between 80% and 85% repeaters, says Trussell. The dip in respondents that have NAC installed could be due to the shift in respondents, he says. But historical survey results for new technologies show that when they are solidly in adoption phase, they have not dipped in this fashion, he says.
The reason businesses are taking out NAC is that the gear doesn’t meet their initial expectations for how easy it would be to install. “It’s certainly a lot slower than what the origin concept was,” he says. “They thought it would be, you roll it out, you plug it in, and it works.”
These same businesses have shifted what they expect from NAC as well, he says. Initially, most respondents wanted it to ensure compliance with enterprise security policies on endpoints, but management of guest-user access is now the most commonly cited reason for using NAC.
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