Jon Oltsik on identity-based networking. As usual, he gets it right. No cringing from the long-time Cisco folks on the DEN reference later in the article. DEN was the right idea, just introduced way too early to survive.
Network access control (NAC) has certainly had a boisterous lifetime.
Cisco Systems first coined this term in 2005 when introducing an initiative to ensure that only “healthy” endpoints could access the network. In the intervening years, the NAC concept gained popularity, drove tremendous VC investment, and most recently came crashing down in a micro boom-to-bust cycle.
So what’s the future for NAC? Out of the ashes, NAC is slowly changing and moving in the right direction toward identity-based networking.