A NAC is one of those prevention measures that can be used to help keep unwanted devices off your network. A good NAC implementation can also allocate shared networked resources more properly and then allow only authorized and vetted devices to get to those resources that are allowed for their use. That good NAC implementation can take at least several weeks of paid professional time, and then maintaining it properly can take more time, as you keep up with the people-and-device changes in your organization. Managed NAC services have therefore become a big business, as more organizations find out how complex doing NAC well and using most of its features can be.
If your reason for getting a NAC is to prevent cyber-attacks, then pairing a good NAC with a RESPOND system makes a lot of sense. RESPOND can tie tightly into a NAC and use that to automatically exclude any device that is found on the monitored networks. The good news is that implementing a NAC-with RESPOND takes a fraction of the effort of putting in an effective NAC the usual way. The ongoing management of the NAC also takes a fraction of the effort of managing a regular NAC. Here’s why this is so: you select the network segments to be protected, and then tie the NAC into Active Directory or some other system that collects changes to people and their devices that use these network segments. This integration shrinks the complexity of a NAC implementation from weeks to days, and then ongoing maintenance is simple—maintaining that Active Directory or other LDAP-compliant device-and-person registration system automatically maintains the NAC. When RESPOND finds a malicious or infected device on those network segments, it automatically tells the NAC to get them off the network and not allow them back on. The time from the discovery of the malicious activity to banishment from the network is about one second, and RESPOND tells you what the device was and what it was doing. Success! You have used a new NAC to automatically protect your networks against hacking, ransomware attacks, malware downloads and other malicious behavior, and you have worked a lot less on getting your new NAC up and running well.
You get all of the cyber protection benefits of having a NAC at a fraction of the deployment cost, and with a fraction of the ongoing upkeep. And you can later expand the installed NAC to provide more positive/preventive control that a fully developed NAC can do, if you decide that you need to add more proactive device control for some other purposes.
AN ASIDE: the RESPOND monitoring and analysis maintains its own accurate inventory of all the devices on the network that it finds, so you also get that built-in inventory application.
RESPOND—a new way to provide cyber protection
- Introduction
- Back-End Improvement
- Revolutionary Capability
- Some Real-World Benefits
- Project Particulars
- RESPOND Costs
- Adding in a Network Access Control System (NAC)
- Expanding a RESPOND System
- Respond Includes a SIEM