Interop: NAC is Back

A. Braunberg

Summary Bullets:

• Several vendors have announced enhanced network access control (NAC) products for addressing BYOD
• The Trusted Computing Group announced a new revision to an important NAC standard (TNC IF-MAP)

I spent the week in Las Vegas at Interop and one of the meta-themes at the event was the issue of how to deal with consumerization of IT and the associated business policy of allowing employee-owned devices on corporate networks. (i.e., BYOD). As I have noted before on this blog, consumerization of IT has far-ranging impacts on enterprise IT requirements and product development strategies. This includes products being enhanced to support the increasing traffic requirements inherent in broad deployment of mobile devices, but it also includes old products finding new life when applied to mobile use cases. A great example of the latter is the re-emergence of NAC to address consumerization of IT.