Microsoft could fulfill security dreams with NAP
Unless third-party security develops something better -- and soon -- NAP or Cisco NAC will rule endpoint security
Follow @infoworldSpring Interop in Vegas. Temperatures in triple-digit positives, air conditioning in double-digit negatives, pneumonia just over the horizon, and loads and loads of NOC geeks playing with the latest tech toys, oblivious to the debauched temptations around them.
Except for Fry's. They can't ignore Fry's. Ever. Want to make a geek happy? Give 'em a Fry's gift certificate and you'll be on their do-favors-for list for the rest of your days.
Or give them one of those Nabaztag smart bunnies. Amazing piece of technology. A plastic manga-bunny with no useful purpose in life whatsoever, but crammed full of every tech hook you can spout: SNMP, RSS, Wi-Fi, robotic ears, e-mail alerts, synced singing, network discovery, mood circuitry, and lots of open APIs so you can customize the thing. Hours of nerd time wasting. Someone brought a small army of the little buggers to Interop and now they're all over the NOC, humming, glowing and waving their little ears in time to some invisible Ethernet beat. God, how I want one! And yet, strangely, the curvaceous yet non-cerebral booth ornament wasn't at all impressed that I knew where she could see four of them. Mystery.
What's not a mystery is the theme of this year's show. It's security, and specifically NAP (Network Access Protection), NAC (Network Admission Control), endpoint security, or anti-malware wubbie. Whatever name you're calling it, it's here and it's coming to a network near you. Fast. Our sister pub, the venerable NetworkWorld, did a piece shortly after Interop Hot Stage, reporting on how three of the bigger endpoint vendors showed real interoperability. (Interop Hot Stage is just that; all the NOC geeks gather in a dank Californian warehouse weeks before the show and prebuild the entire Interop network -- ample chance for any vendor to demonstrate interoperability.)
This time, it was Cisco, Juniper, and our own Microsoft clearly showing that endpoint security solutions can talk to each other if only they'd try. Now that the show has started, the Redmondians also made sure to tout the fact that their endpoint stuff would work with the Trusted Network Connect specs being designed by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG).
So I've got to admit it. Endpoint security is here, it's interoperable, and since it's driven by nasty compliance legislation, no way it's not going to find you sooner or later. But don't let the big names fool you. This is still anybody's game.
