N+I Vegas re-cap

Well I am back from N+I, like I said it was going to be a good week for Network Access Control; and if you were not able to attend N+I check out some of the bellow articles that came out on what we have been doing and I think you will agree.

To save you allot of reading here are a some quotes that I like from these articles:

“The NAC wars are over, apparently, and Microsoft won.”  Tim Wilson, writing in Dark Reading.

"Microsoft won the access control wars last summer…This is an excellent announcement for Microsoft. It is demonstrating the commitment to work with the security community, and the partner program will verify that hardware devices are indeed NAP compatible. Enterprise IT will now look more seriously at Microsoft security for the endpoints." Eric Ogren, Ogren Group, in Dark Reading

 “Today's announcement shows that Microsoft is creating a de facto NAC standard, since it has vowed to work closely with Cisco for NAC and has now teamed up with TNC.” (Robert Whiteley/Forrester in SearchNetworking)

 “…a move that leaders in the network access control (NAC) segment tout as a major step toward getting products made by different vendors to work together.” (Infoworld, Matt Hines)

 “The market for NAC is a competitive one, with the majority of solutions being compatible with one of three overriding frameworks: Cisco NAC, NAP or TNC. But now that NAP is considered an implementation of TNC, the NAC industry could be going from a three-horse race to a two-horse one between Cisco and TNC.” (Internetnews.com/Sean Kerner)

 “The NAP-TNC move streamlines customer choices in this nascent security architecture. Up until May 21, interested organizations have been faced with three standards: NAP, TNC and Cisco's NAC.”  (eWeek/Lisa Vaas)

Although lots of people made this made this possible (thanks BTW), this has been my focus for the last 6 months and what I think is great about it is that customers are already able to get benefits from this, for example:

·         Juniper has announced a schedule for release and showed a demo of their User Access Control (UAC) product that can work with VISTA and XPSP3 clients as well as the Microsoft Network Policy Server.

·         Avenda Systems has announced a schedule for a release and showed a demo of their eTIPS platform which includes a Ubuntu Network Access Protection client that works with 802.1x and a update to their policy server that allows it to directly work with VISTA and XPSP3 clients.

·         Wave Systems announced and showed a demo of a new version of their Embassy Trust Suite that they are working on that includes a NAP System Health Agent (SHA) and a System Health Validator (SHV), this new SHA/SHV promises to provide a way for NAP customers to check the pre-boot integrity of a Windows box helping mitigated the risks of lying hosts.

·         Intel announced and showed a demo of their Active Management Technology (AMT) integrating with nap showing how they can help protect against off-line attacks involving un-trusted boot devices, amongst other things.

·         HP announced and showed a demo of their Identity Management Platform integrating with the Microsoft Network Policy server to do system health checks.

These are just examples many of our partners showed up (Marvel, Broadcom, Nevis Networks, Identity Engines, Cisco, Aruba, DLINK, Alaxala, Extreme, Meru, Nortel, Foundry, U-Net, Enterasys, and more) showing of real integration with Network Access Protection.

This is just the beginning there is allot more on the horizon, speaking of which I need to get back to work!

[Update 5/29/2007] I forgot to include our joint announcement with the TCG about the standardization of the NAP SOH Protocol and the link to the now standard TCG IF-TNCCS-SOH protocol. 

Print | posted on Friday, May 25, 2007 9:11 AM