Evolution of existing NAC Solutions

Various network access control solutions. We’ll look at the evolution of the NAC use cases as they emerged over the past 20 or so years. We’ll also look at the evolution of various NAC products. In particular, we’ll look at the Cisco ISE engine. We’ll also look at the Aruba ClearPass.

If we look at the 2000s, back then we really only had corporate access use cases where we actually connected workstations to our networks. They were primarily wired. Very few of them were wireless. Back in the day, Cisco ACS was number one AAA server or RADIUS server on the planet, and it actually started from a case where it was actually an authentication platform for dial-up modem users back in the day.

Later on, in 2007, Apple introduces an iPhone. This is where we see guest access use case emerging. And followed by that, we see Cisco introduces new platforms or new applications that are standalone servers for a NAC profiler in that guest in response to that guest access use case appearance. In the same time, we see Amigopod emerge as the new company that tries to address that same guest use case.

Well, what we then see is, in 2010, Apple introduces Apple iPad, and with that, we see an emerge of BYOD use case. Now, employees started to bring their iPhones and iPads and other tablets and phones to their enterprise, and they wanted to get access to the network. At that time, Aruba came in, and Aruba actually acquired Amigopod, and Aruba also acquired Avenda, a company that was doing profiling just to address that guest and the BYOD use case as well.

So at that point, Cisco came into the picture and says, OK, we are actually introducing a new product called Cisco ISE, or identity service engine. And what is a Cisco ISE? Cisco ISE is actually a combination of Cisco ACS profiler and guest. So we are combining the three standalone servers into one server.

2011 and 2012, we see ClearPass emerging. What is a ClearPass? ClearPass is a combination of Amigopod, Avenda, and a new .1x authentication server that was part of the ClearPass– again, same picture.

What we see after that– after that, we see a new trend, which is an introduction of the cloud-based identity-as-a-service products, namely Microsoft Azure and Okta Identity Services. At that time, it’s just a trend. It’s still a slow adoption, but that’s when it all started. In 2015, we see yet another trend. That’s IoT.

So we have now four use cases. We have CORP, Guest, BYOD, and IoT, with IoT growing exponentially over the past couple of years. What we see since then? Well, we actually see Cisco updating ISE to version 2.0, 3.0. ClearPass gets a lot of upgrades. But fundamentally, the architecture has never changed since the early 2011 and 2012.