IBM Tivoli and Cisco manual Executive summary, Benefit of NAC

Executive summary

Emerging network security threats, such as viruses, worms, and spyware, continue to plague customers and drain organizations of money, productivity, and opportunity. Meanwhile, the pervasiveness of mobile computing has increased this threat. Mobile users are able to connect to the Internet or the office from home or public hotspots — and can easily and often unknowingly pick up a virus and carry it into the corporate environment, thereby infecting the network.

Network Admission Control (NAC) has been designed specifically to ensure that all endpoint devices (such as PCs, mobile computers, servers, smartphones, and PDAs) accessing network resources are adequately protected from network security threats. NAC’s market-leading solutions, which have been embraced by leading antivirus, security, and management manufacturers, have captured the attention of the press and analyst communities, as well as organizations of all sizes.

This appendix explains the vital role that NAC can play as part of a policy-based security strategy, and describes and defines the available NAC approaches.

The benefit of NAC

Despite years of security technology development and millions of dollars spent in implementation, viruses, worms, spyware, and other forms of malware remain the primary issue facing organizations today, according to the 2005 CSI/FBI Security Report. The large numbers of incidents organizations face annually result in significant financial impact due to downtime, lost revenue, damaged or destroyed data, and loss of productivity.

The message is clear: traditional security solutions alone have not been able to address this problem. In response, Cisco Systems has developed a comprehensive security solution that brings together leading antivirus, security, and management solutions to ensure that all devices in a networked environment comply with security policy. NAC allows you to analyze and control all devices coming into your network. By ensuring that every endpoint device complies with corporate security policy (that they are running the latest and most relevant security protections, for example), organizations can significantly reduce or eliminate endpoint devices as a common source of infection or network compromise.

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