Sean Convery

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.

Technorati Tags: NAC, security

Apologies for the long delay since the last post, things have been very busy at my company. One of the reasons is we’re seeing huge interest in 802.1X among large enterprises. Interestingly enough, much of that interest includes wired 802.1X, not just wireless. We’re having conversations with somewhat conservative companies about 50-100K node wired 802.1X rollouts. This made me curious if we’ve reached some sort of an inflection point around 802.1X adoption. If you have a moment, can you please take the time to reply to this post with your own organization’s wired 802.1X plans? I won’t make this formal, feel free to write as much or as little as you’d like. The things I’m curious about are:

When do you plan to roll-out wired 802.1X?

How many endpoints will that include?

What is the main reason for wired 802.1X deployment?

What has held you back from deploying thus far?

Technorati Tags: 802.1X