Napera

My cofounder ChrisB’s blog post on Lockdown Network’s demise in March received an interesting postscript this week. As reported in Network World, McAfee announced that they will be shipping new NAC products in 2009, including new enforcement and support for unmanaged devices not running the McAfee NAC agent.

Alan at StillSecure blogged his surprise at McAfee building or re-purposing their own ‘stone age’ NAC technology, and I quote:

At best this is a finger in the dike strategy until McAfee realizes that they have to do it the McAfee way. They just can’t build innovation and they have to go out and buy a NAC company.

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A post by Nir Zuk at Palo Alto on innovation and another at OnStartups inspired me to follow up on my earlier posting on why much of the recent innovation in networking and security has come from startups. The first idea I wrote about was the ability to engage with customers. The next is the ability to focus on and quickly innovate around the customer problem.
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It didn’t surprise us when Forrester Research put Microsoft NAP as the frontrunner in the Network Access Control market (The Forrester Wave: Network Access Control, Q3 2008). “Microsoft’s NAP technology is a relative newcomer but has become the de facto standard…,” said Rob Whiteley in his report. While Cisco and others might be able to claim more direct revenue from NAC products as of now, I believe Microsoft has the technology and framework that positions it for success.
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Interop NY has been a great show this year. Although always a little quieter than the West Coast event, there were plenty of familiar faces and the combination of Interop with the Web 2.0 conference in the same venue kept the Javits Center busy yesterday.
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Yesterday’s well hyped NAC debate over at Network World certainly received some attention. I was only able to check in between meetings but they posted an entire transcript and it makes interesting reading.

In one corner, Joel Snyder, well respected NAC expert and Interop regular. I’m partial towards Joel because he has been a voice of reason in the networking space for many years, and his work on NAC and NAP is second to none.

In the other corner, Richard Stiennon, self-titled ‘ Security Industry Innovator’ who regularly exclaims ‘NAC is dead’ to anyone who reads his column at Network World. I don’t believe I’ve ever met Richard, but he was previously at Gartner (where he exclaimed IDS was dead), worked at Fortinet and Webroot for a brief period and recently joined an Australian startup doing MSS. I was doing MSS in Australia in 1995 as it happens, so I guess I must be a security innovator as well.
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Network World suggested with its headline this morning that a recent Infonetics study outlined the top reasons for delaying network access control (NAC) deployments. I think that’s an overly negative headline. While the Infonetics report did discuss some of the blockers to NAC deployments, most of it was positive and covered the increased level of NAC deployments expected over the coming year, and indicated that NAC is becoming a budgetary line item for most companies.

In fact, the report states that nearly two-thirds of the respondents have a budgetary line item for NAC in their fiscal 2009 budgets. That’s double the number for 2008.
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Some very interesting news for the NAC market this week with multiple analysts publishing predictions and market forecasts.

Patrik Bihammar at IDC talked up the threat landscape and says NAC has become a high priority because of the “everything, everywhere” network. IDC expects the NAC market to grow at 43 percent year on year to reach $US3.8 billion by 2011.

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Chris just sent me a great new article at Tech Target from Lisa Phifer on the topic of Securing the New Network. Lisa gives an excellent summary of the state of the art in a couple of intersecting areas such UTM’s, VPN’s and NAC and a couple of relevant quotes caught my eye.

When IDC surveyed enterprises about pressing security challenges for 2007, growing attack sophistication, lack of employee adherence to security policy, and increasing complexity of security solutions and network traffic were top concerns…
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Andrew Conry-Murray at InformationWeek stopped by at Interop for a video interview to talk about Napera products and NAC in the SME.
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We wrapped up at Interop last night. This was another great show for Napera, and thanks to everyone who stopped by. It was good to catch up with the folks we didn’t see at RSA! I’ll post links later to a couple of video interviews we did at the show.

With RSA edging closer to Interop this year, heading to Las Vegas for Interop seemed like a repeat of what we did just a few weeks ago in San Francisco. On a personal note, I like the idea of RSA moving away from their traditional Valentines Day timing, but scheduling these two shows only weeks apart makes me wonder if RSA is trying to elbow Interop out of the picture just as Interop is making a comeback. That would be a great shame, because Interop is a unique tradeshow. The mix of attendees is very different to RSA and the Interop Labs has always been a valuable industry event that cuts through a lot of the marketing hype and gets down to packets and protocols.
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