Microsoft NAP: Above The NAC Fray

Recently Network World reporter Tim Greene wrote about the longer-term view of Network Access Control (NAC), the broader market that Microsoft NAP fits into. Half the 17 companies Gartner considers NAC vendors are legitimate start-ups, and obviously the market won’t support 17 NAC vendors, so we’ll continue to see a shakeout, such as the recent closing of Lockdown Networks. Having formerly been part of the NAC market as CTO at StillSecure, one of the vendors that has risen as a NAC market leader, I still enjoy the competitive battles between NAC vendors.

Tonight I had a really big laugh after reading Alan Shimel’s blog post about his tongue-in-cheek “Better NAC Business Bureau” in response to his and another NAC vendor’s claims to solving the NAC needs for the same customer. Alan started with a used-car-salesman analogy and ended up acting as a self-proclaimed NAC-industry consumer watchdog with his Better NAC Business Bureau. You’d have to know Alan as well as I do to appreciate the thought he likely put into a kooky, funny blogging idea like this. It’s stunts like this that make Alan’s blog such fun to read. If you have a minute, hop on over to Alan’s blog for a good chuckle.

Microsoft’s largely been able to avoid a lot of the direct battles because NAP hasn’t had enough product to be a part of product battles. NAP’s only now made its appearance in Windows Server 2008, with the NAP client in Windows Vista and the recently released service pack for Windows XP. One major piece still remains missing, the NAP management capabilities offered in the Forefront “Sterling” release. (See this post about NAP in the Sterling beta.) Microsoft NAP will be able to seriously stake a claim to NAC when all the pieces are in place. NAP still has its own maturing to do, through multiple customer deployments, which will help work the expected kinks out. Then Microsoft will most likely go after Cisco, Symantec and others where not only NAP/NAC but also much larger security architectures are at stake. Until then, I guess we’ll just have to enjoy the battles like those waged by Alan and his Better NAC Business Bureau. 🙂

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