The Forrester Wave™: Network Access Control, Q2 2011

In Forrester's 72-criteria evaluation of network access control (NAC) vendors, we found few notable points of differentiation between vendor offerings. Thus we have a tight clustering of vendors — all with mature products. ForeScout Technologies, Juniper Networks, Bradford Networks, Cisco Systems, McAfee, and Enterasys all came out as Leaders. Longer-term, Forrester expects the market for standalone NAC solutions to disappear in favor of functionality embedded into diverse security products, such as antimalware, firewalls, host AV, intrusion prevention, and domain controllers. In the short term, if your security requirements necessitate the deployment of a standalone solution, you should consider the vendor's entire product portfolio and ease of deployment as top considerations. Ultimately, your NAC purchase must be done in conjunction with endpoint security or as an extension to existing network infrastructure.