The company said its Secure Enterprise products, are now compatible with Radius authentication-authorization-accounting (AAA) servers from Microsoft Corp and Meetinghouse Data Communications.
Combined with 802.1x EAP interoperability with enterprise switches, announced in May, the company thinks it has the pieces in place to challenge what Cisco Systems Inc is doing with Network Admission Control, and what Microsoft may do.
The idea behind these kind of systems is that hosts can be prevented from getting network access, or quarantined to a remediation network, if they are not compliant with policies. Policies may include required patch levels and up-to-date antivirus.
We’ll see three different competing architectures out there, senior VP of marketing Bill Scull said. Cisco announced theirs, it seems Microsoft is on the verge of announcing theirs, and then there’s the Trusted Computing Group.
Cisco’s NAC was announced last November, and partly delivered upon last month. It uses a combination of open and proprietary elements and requires a Cisco network infrastructure. Opponents call it lock-in.
Microsoft has not showed its cards yet. The company is in late betas with Windows XP Service Pack 2, which has security as its focus. The Security Center component of SP2 arguably has some of the pieces of an endpoint policy agent.
TCG has a standards initiative underway that is being adopted by switch vendors that compete with Cisco, endpoint security firms like Sygate and its rival Zone Labs. Its work is still early-stage.
Today we do in a Sygate-specific way what TCG is planning to do in an open way, Scull said. But the company, one of the lead players in TCG, will adopt standards rather than play the proprietary game. We will be agnostic, he said.
