One of the knottiest problems with NAC technology remains how to get data about devices that can’t run NAC clients such as phones and printers, panelists said in a sold-out Interop workshop devoted to NAC. The best way to deal with it is checking the behavior of devices continuously after they are admitted to the network to flag and block them when they stop acting like printers and phones. “If these devices do things they shouldn’t, you need to know,” said Brendan O’Connell, a senior product manager at Cisco who sat on the panel.
To that end the TCG announced at Interop that it has a new standard that lets other security devices share network security data with NAC platforms, so that firewalls, intrusion detection systems and the like can contribute to ongoing monitoring of devices’ behavior, for example.
