The Management Center software uses a variety of passive and active techniques to identify devices on the network as soon as they connect, helping companies avoid security issues resulting from unmanaged devices, said Lior Tal, co-founder and CEO of Insightix, an Israel-based company with offices in Framingham, Mass. "Most organizations don't know what exists on their network, which is a problem when you want to assess security."
Management Center, available now, collects information on network devices gathered by Insightix's Collector application—including data on operating systems, network configuration and the device's location on the network—and makes this information accessible through a Web-based management console, Tal said.
Administrators can use Management Center to monitor the status of enterprisewide NAC deployments and ensure that all endpoint agents are functioning properly, Tal said. This helps minimize security vulnerabilities that can come about as a result of users disabling or uninstalling agents, Tal added. Having a centralized, unified view of the network infrastructure helps reduce the confusion that sometimes results in geographically distributed companies when one department needs to obtain network infrastructure data from another, Tal said. "Management Center expedites the process by making it possible to find information about everything on the network without having to wait for, or contact someone else in another department."
Management Center is gaining traction in the market due to its ability to collect information on high-level network infrastructure and export it into a topology map, said Ken Kroll, vice president of the application infrastructure division at H&W Computer Systems, a VAR in Boise, Idaho. "We're seeing a lot of interest among people developing plans for enterprise infrastructure who want to essentially understand, in realtime, the changes that are happening in their network environment."
Management Center starts at $9,995.