Napera

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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With JJ blogging about 802.1x, I thought it would be timely to talk about why I think small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) do not and probably never will deploy 802.1x for wired networks.

I make a point of meeting with customers whenever I can. Amongst the small and medium enterprise customers I’ve met, none have shown an interest in deploying 802.1x. The reason is simple – the problems solved by 802.1x do not justify the time and pain involved to setup and maintain it. Many of these customers would love to require everyone to identify themselves prior to joining the network, and want to keep risky machines off their network. They know this makes their networks healthier and easier to maintain. But I’ve yet to meet the customer willing to endure the complexity of 802.1x to get there.
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Ten years ago when our team was developing the Firebox appliance at WatchGuard, we included features common to most firewall solutions of the time. One was the so-called demilitarized network, where customers would securely locate their local web servers. Another was an SMTP proxy for email to protect in-house mail servers. And even though the Firebox was an ‘all in one’ appliance, we asked customers to deploy local servers for logging, reporting and management services.

Later at WatchGuard, when we launched one of the first managed security services platforms for small and medium enterprises, one of the challenges our ISP partners faced was the reluctance of customers to outsource security functions. Our partners told us the concept of storing important information offsite was a frequent objection to buying such a service.
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It’s been 482 days since the founders of Napera put our commitment to this company on paper. This morning we kicked off our official launch, and we’ll be busy through May with tradeshows and press engagements. Finally, our product details are out there!

We created the Napera product line to solve the network health challenge for the small and medium enterprise (SME). As a team, our focus is 100% on that customer. There are over a million SME’s worldwide, but they receive scant attention from enterprise networking vendors. Our earliest meetings with customers in fall 2006 confirmed our suspicions. IT managers want to protect their IT investment from rogue, malicious or careless network users. There was no compelling SME solution in 2006 and the situation remains unchanged today.
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