Sophos's Carole Theriault interviews NAC product specialist Scott
Lewis.
IT security and control firm Sophos, today announced the
availability of a new podcast
which explores the development of Network Access Control (NAC) into
a more sophisticated authentication tool.
Scott Lewis, NAC product specialist, is interviewed by Carole
Theriault about the adoption rate of the technology and whether new
NAC offerings are cost-effective for organizations.
In the podcast entitled "The
evolution of NAC", Lewis explains that earlier versions of NAC
were focused on blocking unknown users, with many hardware
offerings requiring changes to the IT infrastructure, adding to the
management burden.
"The industry's first NAC implementations offered policy
enforcement - if you did not meet the policy requirements, you were
not allowed onto the network. While this approach safeguarded the
network, it certainly did not help productivity," said Carole Theriault, host of
the Sophos podcasts. "Today's leading NAC solutions assess what is
out of kilter on a computer in terms of the company's policies, and
self-remediate automatically, updating all software or installing
any patches for instance. The end-user can get on the network
safely without ever getting the administrator involved."
Lewis explores how new NAC offerings are moving up the value
chain to address and enable IT best practices.
"The fear of data breaches and the need to comply with mandatory
guidelines are fuelling the need for organizations to ensure their
confidential information is secure," continued Theriault. "This new
NAC model provides administrators with visibility into the real
health of their network and even produce reports which can be given
to auditors, saving time and resource."
All Sophos podcasts are available for download at
www.sophos.com/podcasts. Previous podcasts have covered topics such
as phishing, Microsoft Windows Vista, corporate security policies,
SQL injection attacks, Facebook, and rootkits.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.