The non-playing members of England’s 1966 World Cup final squad, including Jimmy Greaves, Peter Bonetti and Jimmy Armfield, will finally receive winners’ medals following a rule change adopted by Fifa. The former sports minister Richard Caborn has led a campaign to have the contribution of the whole squad recognised. Since 1978 all squad members have received winners’ medals and yesterday Sepp Blatter, the Fifa president, said all squad members of winning teams from before then...

BY DONNA HOWELL

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 2/28/2007

If someone tells you most companies lack a knack for security, don’t assume the worst. He might’ve meant NAC.

A mini-industry is growing up around NAC, or network access control, though few firms use it yet. NAC is a way of organizing computer networks. Tech observers say NAC will change how companies handle security in two ways. It will pre-screen what users and devices are safe enough to join corporate networks, and it will authorize what parts of networks they can use.

NAC talk permeated the security field’s annual RSA Conference in San Francisco in late February.

“They should’ve changed the name of RSA to NAC this year it was really all about NAC,” said Aaron Vance, an analyst at Synergy Research Group.

Yet, NAC use remains sparse. “There are some early NAC or NAC-like deployments, but for the most part it isn’t really here yet,” Vance said.

About 45 companies are working on different NAC-related products, Vance says. That includes two big companies that have developed competing frameworks for NAC: Cisco Systems () and Microsoft . ()

‘The Clean Machine’

NAC can involve the use of hardware products such as special switches and appliances, including one Cisco dubbed “the clean machine.”

These products can interact with a host of applications, such as security software. A NAC network could tell, for instance, if a laptop just plugged into the network has up-to-date anti-virus software and security patches. And it could tell if the laptop’s owner has the right credentials to join the network. Some NAC-equipped networks also could keep monitoring thereafter.

“Network access control is all about managing who gets on the network, and managing any device they may be using to see if it meets sufficient security requirements,” said Mitchell Ashley, chief technology officer at NAC application developer StillSecure. “NAC is so important because even those devices managed by the organization represent a potential threat if they were to be compromised in some way.”

The concerns range from viruses and worms that could disrupt a network, to Trojans that could send off personal data, to the presence of peer-to-peer music-sharing programs that could make unauthorized bandwidth demands.

To carry out full network access control, Yankee Group analyst Chris Liebert says, a product needs to do several things: It needs to see if the device connecting to the network is secure and the user authorized before granting access. It needs to quarantine noncompliant devices, then prompt them to get compliant (perhaps by downloading new anti-virus updates). It needs to ensure that devices granted access stay compliant. It also needs to be able to report on what it’s done.

“There are some players who do parts and bits of it,” Liebert said. “(Only two) vendors have the entire solution baked.”

Vendors doing a lot of NAC functions with switches include Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, () Nortel Networks, () Juniper Networks, () and Extreme Networks, () she says. While vendors doing a lot of NAC with appliances include Cisco, Symantec () and McAfee. ()

Liebert says Cisco and Juniper are the only two that really do it all.

NAC-ronyms

An alphabet soup of NAC schemes has been in development for years. Cisco’s architectural framework for NAC, which Vance says has the popularity edge, is called Network Admission Control, which also uses the NAC acronym. Microsoft’s is called Network Access Protection, or NAP, and can interoperate with Cisco’s approach. While the open-standard Trusted Network Connect, or TNC, comes from the Trusted Computing Group, a tech alliance that includes Intel, () Microsoft, IBM, () HP, Sun Microsystems () and AMD. ()

Full NAC implementations that involve network hardware upgrades can cost millions of dollars, Vance says.

“NAC is unproven at this point and it’s very, very expensive, especially for very large organizations with disparate networks and lots of equipment deployed,” he said. “It behooves Cisco from a revenue point of view to push switches. NAC involves upgrades to edge switches, which is where Cisco makes most of its money.”

Liebert says the present market for network access control is stagnant. She says companies wonder about the cost, how to manage the technology and whether NAC is worth changing the way they already do things.

Firms that do try to implement NAC networks often start out using it to address a specific need, says StillSecure’s Ashley.

The need might be to help ensure security when contractors use the network or employees must reach it from home. After that, firms may roll out NAC to more of the network.

“Most organizations are embarking on some sort of NAC project,” Ashley said. “Many have begun to deploy NAC and some are fully-deployed.”

Some aspects of Microsoft’s NAP are built into its new Vista operating system and upcoming Longhorn server software. Analysts say that could help spur NAP adoption.

As NAC catches on, expect consolidation among its vendors, Vance says.

“That 45 number will narrow down into anywhere from about 10 to 20, with the definite people there at the end being Cisco and Microsoft,” he said. “They will be the bellwethers in this initiative.”

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