NAC manageability does not mean blending it in as an afterthought

Bill Brenner continues to write about NAC and NAC vendors over at SearchSecurity.com (Bill hasn't reached out to us on this series though, where is the love Bill?).  Today's article talks about NAC vendors staking their future on manageability. Bill after the usual NAC bashing reports that The Mogull says that Microsoft and Cisco have not successfully provided the functionality and management that customers want.  OK, I will go along with that.  Than Bill goes to the vendors to verify that.  He picks two companies that frankly are not known for NAC and have very little if any success with NAC.  Checkpoint talks about how they use NAC with their existing firewalls, VPNs, etc.  Of course they don't mention that if you don't have an 802.1x network you are SOL using Checkpoint for NAC.  NAC is an afterthought for Checkpoint just thrown into mix so they can say they have that too.  Using them as a poster child for providing functionality and manageability for NAC to compete with Cisco and Microsoft is as bad as using LANDesk Software, another non-factor in the NAC market.  But of course that is exactly who Bill goes to next. Bill why not go to NAC vendors who are really selling NAC.  Not guys who quickly bolted something on to their existing line and don't get NAC and never will.  The guy from LANDesk has this to say:

The vendors who are positioned unfavorably are those who are strategically centered around NAC," he said. "If you base your model on NAC adoption, you'll fail or do what Vernier did. The big companies will succeed because NAC isn't where they're making their money.

Now that sounds like an advocate for NAC if I ever heard one.  Can you spell A-F-T-E-R-T-H-O-U-G-H-T?   These guys wouldn't know a good NAC if it hit them in the face. They don't consider NAC strategic by their own admission and would like nothing better than for NAC to go away so they can go back to their patch management business.

To be fair Bill does ask Dan Clark from Lockdown what he has to say and Dan strikes a blow for NAC vendors everywhere. However, I don't agree with Dan that vendors who offer NAC as a feature will go away. I just don't see McAfee or Symantec and such folding their tents any time soon. I don't know call me crazy.  Than of course Dan goes on to say about how great Lockdown is doing and all of the Fortune 100 customers they have. Yeah, I think I remember reading about those customers in all of the great press releases from Lockdown.  In the meantime my little birds tell me Lockdown would like nothing better than to be picked up and become a feature in someone else's product.

People stop the drama! NAC is going through the usual maturation and evolution most every IT technology goes through. It will come out the other side better, different and more manageable and mature, able to do the job it was designed for.  The companies that stick it out and continue to grow and evolve to keep up with customers demands will reap the benefits.