Unified Access Control

Enterprises have been facing the need for access control for some time. This need began in the extended enterprise segment, where remote users, often on unmanaged or unmanageable devices, sought access to vital LAN resources. When such users were not granted access, productivity suffered. When users were granted IPsec VPN access, however, the wide-open tunnel between their endpoint and the LAN often served as a freeway for viruses, worms, spyware, or other malware that the user’s endpoint might have contracted.

SSL VPNs have largely solved the problem of safely providing network applications and resources to unknown devices by associating the endpoint security state with user authentication, and by providing specific session-based roles as well as very granular resource policies. As the 3rd party populace fast becomes part of the campus LAN audience, however, the same problem is being recreated in the campus LAN. In fact, in some cases, the demand for access control is stronger in the LAN itself, since the user audience can be even more diverse than that seen in the extended enterprise. And as the audiences vary, so too do the endpoints, from mobile devices that transit the network perimeter, to business partner devices that are not managed by the enterprise, to guest user devices that may not be managed at all. Today’s campus was built with the presumption that the user’s location – on the LAN – was an effective indication of trust, and most LANs today have little to no built-in protection as a result. If you are on the campus, in most cases, you are on the LAN…and so too is whatever security threats or vulnerabilities you have probably unknowingly, brought with you.

In response, the access control market is booming. Dozens of vendors, ranging from startups to established networking and security vendors, are using the “access control” buzzword to get your attention. In some cases,these are legitimate, well-thought-out offerings; in others, they are little more than marketing promises that make use of current terminology, or multi-vendor “solutions” that attempt to repurpose existing technologies in a new way.