NAC Happenings At Interop

Earlier this summer I was tapped for NAC Day 2008. It's a day-long event on the topic of Network Access/Admission Control at Interop NY held at the Javits Center. I'll agree to almost anything if I can get a trip to Manhattan out of the deal. I hope to cover nearly every aspect of NAC in 5 hours and 45 minutes.Joel Snyder, in addition to being a consultant and writing for Network World, is a long-time contributor to Interop but had a conflicting engagement. The content is loosely based on Joel's previous NAC Day presentations (OK, I copied a few slides but gave him credit).

The soup to nuts presentation starts out with the varying definitions of NAC. Then I dive into explaining NAC architectures as defined by Cisco, Microsoft, and the Trusted Computing Group. After what I hope is a rousing Q&A with some senior staff from Cisco, Symantec, and Sophos. I also will be peppering in results from my recent NAC Analyst Report [registration required] as well.

In the afternoon, I talk about the types of deployment options, in-line and secure switch NAC, out-of-band NAC, and host-based NAC and describe the principle benefits and weakness in each approach. And then I have a few war stories from companies that have deployed NAC.

Then on Thursday from 10:15 to 11:15, I am moderating a panel titled "NAC, NAC - What's There?" (Don't laugh at me, I didn't write the title) with Steve Hanna, Trusted Network Connect (TNC) co-chair, Trusted Computing Group; Stephen Karkula, security product marketing manager, Nokia; Amith Krishnan, senior product manager, Windows Server Group, Microsoft; and Brendan O'Connell, senior manager, product management, Cisco Systems.

The panel description is "Network access control has been offered as the Swiss army knife of IT security solutions. It has promised to provide authentication, policy enforcement, identity and access management, ongoing security for the life of a connection, seamless usage in any network that is NAC-enabled, and many other capabilities."

"If NAC is the answer, then what is the right question to ask? This session will provide a realistic perspective on what NAC can and cannot provide in regard to information security. Concepts that will be discussed will include an update on vendor interoperability and standards, case studies of successful and not so successful implementations, an overview of what NAC truly can and cannot provide, discussion of requirements (both network and application), and what the future holds for NAC."

Hope to see you there. And please, no playing "stump the presenter."