Napera

Network Access Control makes Network World’s list of Nine hot technologies for 2009, along with virtualization, Green IT and cloud computing. The following quote about Microsoft NAP after the shakeout of the NAC standards battle caught my eye.

“Because Network Access Protection … comes with Vista and Windows Server 2008, deciding to go with Microsoft has become a no-brainer for many customers.

NAP represents a clear choice, rather than a technology that requires extensive research, RFPs, product tests and evaluations, and so forth.”

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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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