2010 is shaping up to be a year that continues to emphasize the need for security. One potential solution that has been promoted for several years is network access control (NAC). NAC has come about as a response to the increased need for security by large and small organizations. If you’ve been considering NAC, there are several ways to deploy this security solution. These include infrastructure-based NAC, endpoint-based NAC, and hardware-based NAC.

I have to deviate from our latest discussion track to bring up some exciting news in NAC world. This past week Cisco decided to release NAC 4.6 (it also just so happens to be Cisco Live here in Frisco but we won’t go there). Anyway, since there are quite a number of people who are following […]

So now that we’ve created a Check, a Rule, and have associated the Check with the Rule, we can move on to the next phase: create a Requirement. Think about a Requirement as the remediation process your users will have to go through if they fail the check. In other words, what do you want […]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T3_Sbkp_dg] Global Knowledge instructor, and author on this blog, Jim Thomas reviews the top three Cisco Security technologies found in standard networks: the MARS appliance, Cisco Security Manager, and the NAC appliance.

We’ll pick up where we last left off with our previous post. We were discussing the NAC checks and left off discussing the registry check. Just as a FYI, most installs we do out in the world using NAC usually involve three basic checks. The first is to look to see if the host is […]

Ok so it’s been a while for the blogs so I’ve decided to jump back and forth to different areas based on the surrounding happenings. For this weeks’ blog I’d like to run a quick discussion through on NAC and compliance checking. I know a lot of people who struggle in this arena and are […]

So now that we have the NAC agent installed, we can take a look at the process the host goes through in order to achieve NAC login. The first thing to understand is the SWISS Protocol that Cisco has created. When an agent is installed on the host machine and loads as a user process, it […]

In previous posts, we discussed the authentication component of the NAC Appliance and how the trigger process begins once a host is introduced to the network. In our last discussion I brought up the NAA (NAC Appliance Agent) so let’s dive further into this agent. The NAA is our “middleware” that allows the NAC Appliance to […]

To refresh everyone’s memory, my last few posts have been discussing the Network Admission Control (NAC) Appliance and Framework. So where does this thing called NAC Appliance fit in? Is this technology right for you? Are you ready for NAC? Here is an introduction to the Cisco NAC Appliance and how it differs from the […]

When we last left off we were discussing a Cisco NAC Framework scenario using a router. We had discussed the required configuration on the ACS server with ACLs and Attribute Definition Files. But we cannot just get away with only configuring the ACS server and NADs. You must also think about the hosts themselves. Our […]