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According to Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Network Access Control”*, “Most NAC vendors provide good support for the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) use case. Now, the market is evolving to address another use case, where NAC policy servers act as ‘warehouses of context’ and share contextual data with firewalls and other security components to enable fine-grained policy enforcement.”

The report also states, “The BYOD phenomenon continues to be the primary driver for the adoption of network access control (NAC). Without NAC policies, corporate BYOD programs allow unchecked network access by a wide array of personally owned devices, thereby increasing the chances of security risks and network instability. Another important NAC trend is the integration with other security components, such as next generation firewalls, advanced threat defence (ATD) solutions and security information and advanced management (SIEM) solutions. Forward-thinking NAC vendors have positioned their solutions as ‘warehouses of context’ to share contextual information with third-party security components.”*

In this report*, “leaders are successful in selling large NAC implementations (10,000 nodes and greater) to multiple large enterprises. Leaders are pure-play NAC vendors or networking and/or security companies that have been first to market with enhanced capabilities as the market matures. Leaders have the resources to maintain their commitment to NAC, have strong channel strength and have financial resources. They have also demonstrated a strong understanding of the future direction of NAC, including the impact of BYOD. Leaders should not equate to a default choice for every buyer, and clients should not assume that they must buy only from vendors in the Leaders quadrant.”

* Gartner, Inc. “Magic Quadrant for Network Access Control,” report G002627237, 10 December 2014, Lawrence Orans and Claudio Neiva.