Symantec NAC

Symantec Network Access Control offers complete endpoint protection for your corporate network with easy deployment and management features

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

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Sometimes it happens that the anti-virus signatures are not up-to date or the firewall is turned off on a user desktop, be it remote or local. This means that the client system is insecure and prone to virus or spyware attack. However, if it is a small network of say 10 systems, network administrators can easily track such issues. But when it comes to a large corporate network, tracing such issues becomes really difficult. This necessitates a solution like SNAC (Symantec Network Access Control) for managing securities of systems in your enterprise. This version of Symantec NAC offers you single agent for managing all the Symantec endpoint protection products such as, anti-virus and NAC, making things simple and lot easier for network administrators by providing a unified reporting and maintenance service. In addition to this, SNAC can provide on-demand agent. It can dynamically create an agent and deploy to the guest system through SNAC enforcer appliance to make your network secure.

SNAC not only detects who is connecting to the network but also what is connecting to the network such as server, PDAs etc. It automatically blocks devices that are not authorized and automatically repair ones that are not compliant. Symantec NAC also provides support for MS Network Access Point, and it enables administrators to install a single system health validator on the MS Network Policy Server. Hence it reduces the pain of installing multiple system health validator for every third party application that is installed at the client side, and gives you better integration with NAP. For reviewing this product, we installed it on a server with a Xeon 3 GHz processor, 4 GB RAM, and Windows 2003 Enterprise Server. At the client side, we used Windows Vista and XP. Installation of the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager was over in a couple of minutes. With its easy-to-use interface it was pretty easy to do the initial configuration. As the installation gets finished, it prompts to run the Migration and Deployment wizard. This wizard helps in creating agent for both 32 and 64 bit clients with a single click. Once the agents are created, we installed them on different clients. It was just one click installation and everything on the client side was configured. Next we created a new policy using the Symantec Endpoint protection manager console, and deployed it. Within minutes, the clients who didn't meet the policy were notified with a warning message and those who did meet were shown a healthy sign on their system tray. In addition to this, it also provides the option to control the number of times a user can cancel remediation and whether host integrity check be done on the host. The reporting service offered by this application is very elaborative. It provides various report types such as audit, compliance, computer status, etc.

With the migration and deployment wizard, you can configure the agent for unattended or slient installation also.

Bottomline: Given the easy deployment feature and single agent architecture, it is worth deploying in large enterprises.

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