More NAC announcements

Viva Las Vegas! I've just completed a 32 hour epic flight from Cape Town to Las Vegas to attend the Microsoft Partner Advisory Council - and I'm bushed and minus my luggage. The joys of travel...

We have some more news on NAC. First, Cisco has extended NAC support to its range of Catalyst switches and introduced new features allowing companies to enforce security polices on users' devices. Cisco also added new partners to its NAC program and upgraded its line of NAC hardware appliances. NAC support has been extended to its wireless access points as well. Cisco now has over 60 vendors participating in the NAC initiative. The fact that Cisco has finally extended NAC support to its line of switches means that users are likely to be more interested in the technology than they were when it was only available on Cisco routers, although larger organizations and those running older Cisco hardware are also likely to need expensive upgrades of their routers and switches to be able to use NAC.

Second, Qualys, Inc., the leading provider of on demand vulnerability management and policy compliance solutions, today announced the integration of its QualysGuard on demand vulnerability management solution with the Cisco Network Admission Control (NAC) program. Until now, auditing unmanaged devices for security vulnerabilities before accessing the network was a challenge for enterprises seeking to limit damages from viruses and worms. With QualysGuard for NAC, organizations can automatically audit NAC agentless hosts attempting network connection, without any software to install or manage.

CATEGORIES: 1endpoint security, 1NAC, 1vendor announcements, 1admission control,1vulnerability management