Trend to offer free Cisco network protection

Trend Micro is planning to offer network security protection based on Cisco's Network Admission Control (NAC) this summer, and won't charge existing customers any more for the service. 

Roger Levenhagen, Trend Micro's managing director for UK and Ireland, said on Tuesday that his company is aiming to beat the likes of Symantec by getting a NAC-based product to market.

Once launched, customers who are already paying for Trend's desktop antivirus product will get the NAC component on top.

"By letting existing customers who already have a Cisco infrastructure get this additional protection for free, we're pushing down the barriers to take-up," said Levenhagen,

NAC is Cisco's attempt to fight suspicious application behaviour by placing a small agent on each desktop that connects to a central management console that logs any attacks. Cisco says this is an improvement on signature-based network protection, which can only recognise attack code that has been used before. This can allow attacks exploiting undocumented vulnerabilities to slip easily through the system.

Levenhagen said that Trend's NAC product will be launched on 15 June.