Assessment
Network Access Control (NAC) Readiness Assessment
Network Access Control (NAC) solutions are complex and heavily dependent on the capabilities of your network infrastructure. A NAC Readiness Assessment can help you determine where you are and how to plan and deploy a NAC solution. When coupled with our Enterprise Segmentation Workshop, a NAC Assessment can do everything from helping you determine if NAC is the right solution to selecting the right OEM to building out a comprehensive deployment roadmap.
Details
Organizations often purchase a solution — or even move into a solution's deployment phase — without first evaluating whether it will properly operate within their environment or confirming they have the resources to appropriately utilize it.
Because NAC solutions cross many technology silos and can impact your entire organization, applying this approach to NAC solutions can lead to anything from poor user experience to work stoppage and financial loss.
That's why it's crucial to understand whether your environment is better suited to function with one NAC solution versus another — through an assessment like ours — before purchasing a solution to meet organizational requirements.
Approach
We tackle NAC readiness by thoroughly examining and validating multiple technology facets within your network infrastructure. Key is understanding your environment's current state as a functional entity as well as each individual component. This holistic approach ensures the highest probability for success.
Some areas typically examined in a NAC Readiness Assessment from WWT include:
- Investigation of relevant network services (DNS, DHCP, NTP, SNMP, etc.)
- Validation of network device hardware and software for desired feature support
- Examination of targeted identity sources
- Validation of virtual and physical server infrastructure and support capabilities
- Increased awareness of the current endpoint environment
- Evaluation of software agent compatibility
Objectives
The primary objective of the NAC Readiness Assessment is to determine the viability of successful solution deployment within your current environment.
That said, it's almost a foregone conclusion that there will be relevant components or services that do not meet or cannot support your organization's specified requirements. In such cases, our Readiness Assessment can be leveraged to identify such gaps. This enables appropriate accommodations to be made in deployment roadmaps, which can help align lifecycle activities.
An assessment might include tasks such as:
An assessment might include tasks such as:
- User and data classification
- Component software upgrades
- Component hardware replacement
- Relevant service updates
- Network segment zoning or restructuring
- Modification of relevant network addressing
- Micro segmentation
- Security automation
Finally, our NAC Readiness Assessment can also be used by organizations that simply need help understanding what OEM solutions might best fit their environment. Our assessment can serve to reconcile your environment profile with specific requirements and potential vendor capabilities.
NAC design, while effective, can be complex. Due to this complexity, we highly encourage organizations to simplify their project from the onset by conducting a qualified NAC Readiness Assessment through WWT.