McAfee aims to ease NAC woes

McAfee Unified Secure Access aims to simplify NAC deployment and management

Security giant McAfee has today launched a new network access control (NAC) solution designed to reduce the deployment and management issues traditionally associated with these technologies.

McAfee Unified Secure Access is centrally managed via the firm's ePolicy Orchestrator product, and features McAfee's NAC Appliance and Network Access Control 3.0 products.

The offering also includes the Network Security Platform 5.1 intrusion prevention system and the McAfee NAC Module for Network Security Platform software, which adds in-line enforcement as well as identity and application-based access controls, according to McAfee marketing manager Dan Woolf.

"NAC was not only extremely costly but needed a network heart surgeon to put in," he said. "We've looked to rewrite the proxy of our ePolicy Orchestrator and NAC products so you'll have compliance and network access control under the same scheme."

Graham Titterington, a principal analyst at Ovum, suggested that the McAfee NAC solution was a "step forward" from other offerings because it overcomes some of the traditional management and deployment issues associated with these products.

"I have always been sceptical about NAC, mainly because of its inflexibility, " he said. "If you are being prevented from editing your PowerPoint slideshow at the last minute because your virus protection is two days out of date it's not going to be very popular."

Titterington welcomed McAfee's attempts to build in more fine-grained access permissions, which may give very trusted users access to certain applications with a lower system health requirement than others, for example.