* Citrix buys Caymas' NAC assets
Citrix has bought the assets of NAC vendor Caymas Systems, giving Citrix yet another means for guarding networks and applications.
The deal brings Citrix a combo SSL VPN/NAC gateway, but apparently that’s not what Citrix is interested in.
The company says it won’t continue to develop Caymas gateways and won’t support those that are currently deployed in customer networks.
Citrix already has its own SSL VPN technology, so it is unlikely that it will draw much from Caymas in that arena.
But it can use Caymas’s team that developed its NAC capabilities to develop new products that fit into Citrix’s varied product lines.
These include its thin-client Presentation Server, application acceleration devices, WAN optimization gear, a Web application firewall, the SSL VPN gateway and end-user application-performance monitoring platforms.
Some of these products require client software on individual PCs, and these clients could be upgraded to include endpoint scans as well as behavioral scans to provide NAC for the hosts.
Caymas has also developed a downloadable agent that can perform NAC duties and then dissolve when it is done, so NAC could be extended to machines that don’t have permanent clients.
It would be a sound addition to Citrix’s current remote-access and site-to-site gear to have a means for making sure machines and the people using them are authenticated and authorized to access resources according to policy.
If these NAC capabilities can be extended to local connections, the company will have taken another step toward its vision of providing application access management. Stay tuned for more on this as Citrix comes forward with more details about its plans.
