VAR's Voice: NAC

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Dan Thormodsgaard, director of solutions architecture at Fishnet Security Inc., based in Kansas City, Mo., gives a few tips for successfully getting into the NAC space.

ASSESS CUSTOMERS' INFRASTRUCTURE:
Research process and technologies for a NAC solution. Do your due diligence and look for a solution that's multivector for authentication and authorization. Above all, most NAC solutions have to fit into the enterprise. Look at manageability. Enforcing or discussing enforcing a NAC policy is a daunting task. What does it look like today? If you want to enforce it, what kind of impact does it have on the organization?

ESTABLISH CLEAR OBJECTIVES: You need to identify what your business requirements are, what you're trying to accomplish. Some areas are compliance. In order for them to comply, they have no choice. Next there are some risk-mitigation objectives, to protect data systems. Implementation on the remote access side is well-received and budgeted. Same for guest access for wired and wireless—more so [for] wireless. If they can have one solution that provides that NAC access, that is the desired state.

EDUCATE YOUR CUSTOMER: We provide strategic guidance for customers—we are educating them on NAC for the most part. Often they're talking about a specific product. But there isn't one product that has an overall encompassing solution around NAC. You've got other components.

IMPLEMENT IN PHASES: In Q1 and Q2 they have a budget, but they're kind of pushing back on purchasing. It's not an absolute thing that they have to do—unless there's a clear business objective to why they're doing it. Try to talk short-term and long-term strategy.'

Next: Handling Objections

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