Cisco NAC Appliance: Enforcing Host Security with Clean Access

Chapter 2. Introducing Cisco Network Admission Control Appliance

This chapter covers the following topics:

• Cisco NAC Approaches
• Cisco NAC Appliance Overview
• Cisco NAC Return on Investment

The primary goal of Cisco Network Admission Control (NAC) Appliance is to proactively enforce corporate host security policies on users and hosts accessing the network. A primary advantage of this solution is enabling ubiquitous user authentication at the network layer, and then using that information to grant network access based on the user's identity and characteristics of the device. For example, all guest users receive only limited Internet access and no internal access. Cisco NAC can leverage existing security technologies, such as antivirus, antispam, ...