A NAC in hand is worth two in the bush

Mike Fratto, fresh off hosting the NAC festivities at NY Interop (wanted to make it up there but had to go to St Louis instead) has an interesting article up called "Beating the NAC Standards Bush".  Mike relates his experience hosting a panel of paid sponsors for NAC day.  Like other fairy tales, this story has three characters, one was Cisco (too big), one was Sophos (too small) and one was Symantec (just right). The discussion on the panel, as invariably happens at Interop got around to NAC standards.  Of course Cisco is Cisco and is working with IETF.  So what if it moves on geological time frames. Symantec and I guess Sophos are part of the TCG/TNC (as is StillSecure, in the spirit of full disclosure). 

It seems some people gave Rich Langston of Symantec a tough time because the TCG is a "closed" group, as opposed to the IETF.  Rich responds that the closed group allows them to move forward faster and more efficiently.  At the end of the day, Mike says customers want "a standard" to come to the forefront and don't care much which one it is, as long as it is one.  He  seems to be partial to the TCG.

My view as in the title, is it is more important today to get a NAC product that works.  People are tired of the alphabet soup of NAC standards.  Though Symantec and 45+ others are members of the TCG, the perception is that it is still the Juniper standard. 

Yes, it would be nice to have a dominant standard and I hope it is the TCG standard too.  But Mike is right on with his last sentence in the article.  Only when customers are truly making decisions based upon these standards will NAC vendors fully support them.