Cisco to Unify NAC Offerings, Attempt to Lower Barriers to Adoption

By John Burke, Nemertes Principal Research Analyst
Sept. 6, 2007

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) is hoping to lower the barriers to enterprise adoption of its NAC by bridging the divide separating users of its two disparate NAC technologies: Cisco's NAC Appliance and NAC Framework. The appliance, acquired with Perfigo in 2004, is more popular and is generally deployed in-line, between edge switches and an enterprise LAN to control access to the LAN.

The NAC framework uses security features embedded in Cisco switches, guided by an ACS/RADIUS policy server. The two NAC offerings require separate agents on PCs connecting to the network and have very different management methods. Cisco's plan is to bring the two strategies together over the next 12 to 18 months by adopting the appliance's well-regarded management system for the framework and by combining the two desktop agents.

Fewer than 15% of participants in Nemertes' recent "Security and Information Protection" research benchmark apply NAC checks beyond authentication,- but nearly 60% wish they could be expanding NAC to include OS patch-level or personal firewall checks.

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