Good article by Neil Roiter from Information Security Magazine on NAC moving ahead as the hype subsides. For a change from other articles we have read recently, Neil gives a true to life, no holds barred assessment of where NAC is in the market.  I think some of the comments from Lawrence Orans over at Gartner are right on.  However, one he misses is in talking about the Cisco-Microsoft NAC partnership. I think the TCG-Microsoft partnership has replaced that one and Cisco is going to join that party through the NEA. 

For me though the quote of the article was this one by Brendan O'Connell, Cisco's product line manager for NAC, "NAC is an Easter egg hunt. Policy lives in a lot of different places .."  So does that make Cisco the NAC Easter Bunny? Seriously, policy does live in a lot of different places.  I think eventually the answer lies in marrying network based admission control policies with endpoint based configuration policies.  This is an area that is ripe for interaction and integration.  I also think that Symantec talking about customers want a NAC solution, but not another console or another agent was a bit ironic.  Just because you lump your agents together doesn't mean you have not added yet more overhead to the equation.  Anyone who has used Symantecs new Endpoint Security with all of the mods turned on can talk to you about overhead and resource use. Whether the agent is separate or not, it is what the overhead is that counts.

In any event, though Neil did not mention StillSecure (tsk, tsk) I thought this article was right on, that despite the naysayers and the inflated hype, NAC is being adopted in the market. It is maturing and most of all it is providing value to customers.