The Forrester report referenced in the last newsletter says that the expanding definition of NAC will result in more features more widely adopted by NAC vendors next year.

The report, called “NAC Remains A 2008 Blockbuster – But Wait Until You See The 2009 Coming Attractions,” keys in on three coming attractions:
1. Application level control
2. Asset tracking/endpoint profiling
3. Virtualization.

As the report notes, these are already features of some NAC vendors’ gear, so they’re not really coming attractions in the sense that we’ve never seen them before. But what Forrester means is that they will be more widely adopted and become more of the accepted body of features that comprise NAC, says Usman Sindhu, one of the analysts who wrote the report.

Application level control will be expressed by NAC platforms tapping into existing identity and access management platforms to increase the specificity of policies that can be enforced by NAC products. Rather than just enforce who can access an application, it might enforce what they can do once they have that access.

Asset tracking/endpoint profiling identifies devices on networks and classifies them as desktops or laptops, but also the phones printers, cameras and any other IP device attached to a switch. This is useful for NAC enforcement, but also for pure asset tracking, the report says.

Virtualization will have a dual impact, with vendors supporting deployment of their platforms on virtual machines and by offering hooks into their software so they can be linked to management consoles of virtualization products.

While these features are not ubiquitous among NAC products, they are represented by enough products today that they probably don’t deserve to be called “new disruptive features” as the report refers to them.

But if they do become ubiquitous, the will go a long way toward broadening the scope and usefulness of NAC. And it will make the analysis surrounding the purchase of NAC gear more complex.

To learn more about the report click here.

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.