I'm Simon Khalaf, the CEO of Vernier Networks, and today Iwant to talk to you about what is NAC. NAC, network access control, is asecurity technology that blocks unauthorized access to IT resources from insidethe network.
We've heard a lot about external threats, but today whatpeople are concerned about is the insider threat to the network, and that'swhat NAC addresses. This summer, we conducted a survey and we found that 53percent of organizations are considering deploying NAC next year.
This is not surprising, given that studies by Gartner, theFBI and the Computer Security Institute found that 75 percent of all threatsare coming from inside the network, and that amounts to 150 billion dollars insecurity losses. So today, we're going to go over the five phases of NAC.
The first phase of NAC is the authentication phase, which iswhat NAC Solutions use to identify a laptop or a person connecting to thenetwork, getting its identity. Is it that of a contractor, guest or employee?That's what's the authentication phase determines.
The second phase of NAC is the validation phase, which isthe technology NAC solutions use to see what's on the desktop. Does it have thelatest antivirus software? Is the personal firewall turned on? Are the latestOS patches deployed? That's what's done in the validation phase.
Based on the identity of the person and the security postureof the device, we go to the authorization phase of NAC, which decides whatrights you have on the network, which is where you can go on the network basedon your identity and what you have on the device.
After that, when the device is on the network, we go to avery important phase of NAC, which is the inspection phase, which is looking atthe traffic generated from the device and making sure it stays compliant. If itstarts sending spyware or worms, then it automatically goes into the fifthstage of NAC, the quarantine and remediation phase, which is a stage you get toif you're not compliant from the beginning, or you become un-compliant duringany work you do on the network.
So, what is NAC? It's the five phases: authentication,validation, authorization, inspection, quarantine and remediation. Essentially,it's the security technology used to block unauthorized access to IT resourcesfrom inside the network.
