Cisco plans to blend two NAC schemes
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Customers will be able to buy Cisco's NAC appliance -- the NAC option most of its customers opt for first -- and later migrate to itsnetwork-based NAC Framework architecture without having to swap out as many elements.
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Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Monday will announce a collaborative effort designed to bridge a divide between their emerging network access-control architectures.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. plan to release a jointly developed product in July as part of an expansion of their existing alliance around telecommunications network management and service assurance, the companies said Thursday. The new offering, Cisco Assurance Management Solution, integrates Cisco's Active Network Abstraction (ANA) device management and mediation technology with IBM's Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus and Netcool/Precision management software, according to Alan Ganek, chief technology officer, IBM Tivoli Software. The vendors have been working on the product for about a year, he said. Ganek's hopeful that the new product will appeal not only to telecom carriers but also to large enterprises such as financial services providers that are looking for a simpler way to manage their heterogenous networks. IBM does have "very high expectations" about the likely revenue the codeveloped product might generate, Ganek said, though he declined to name a figure. IBM and Cisco also didn't provide any financial details about their expanded relationship. "IBM's overall partnership with Cisco has largely been around the services area," Ganek said. "This new one really gets into our development teams in the software world." IBM and Cisco struck a broad-based strategic alliance back in 1999 and in recent months have been collaborating on multiple fronts including an expansion of their unified communications partnership and a combined cooperative support offering. The first version of Cisco Assurance Management Solution will offer features including network fault monitoring, trouble isolation and real-time service-level event management. Future versions of the software will include more of IBM's Tivoli systems and network management technology, Ganek said. The next natural additions would be the Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database and Tivoli Monitoring, he added. Over the long term, new releases of Cisco Assurance Management Solution could also include technology IBM acquired from the purchase of network performance monitoring software company Vallent, Ganek said. IBM closed the purchase of Vallent in February and the software became part of its Tivoli business unit. IBM gained access to the Netcool software after buying network management specialist Micromuse in February 2006. It's also possible that IBM and Cisco may release other jointly developed software, he added. Ganek stressed that the IBM/Cisco relationship isn't exclusive and that IBM also has "great relationships" working closely with most of the other network equipment providers. Cisco's ANA already interoperates with other members of the Tivoli family including Tivoli Netcool/Impact and Tivoli Business Service Manager. Cisco has been rebranding IBM's Tivoli Netcool as Cisco Info Center for some time and it's being used by more than 500 of its customers. Â
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10/19/2004 -- Microsoft and Cisco are teaming up to share security information across products, an effort that should ultimately make offerings from both vendors more secure.
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With the Apple iPhone trademark battle now fading from memory, Cisco has forged ahead to its next mission: new business collaboration tools to compete with Avaya and Nortel.
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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK - IBM and Cisco Systems are broadening their security alliance to offer new automatic security applications for enterprise networks.
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Cisco Systems, which has been under growing competitive pressure lately in the high-end router space, announced a series of initiatives this week designed to improve its market position, as well as bolster its relationship with telecom service providers.
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Fujitsu Ltd. and Cisco Systems Inc. said today they have agreed to enter into a strategic alliance focusing on routers and switches that will help service providers and enterprises build advanced IP networks.
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(InfoWorld) - Enterprise applications vendor SAP and networking company Cisco Systems are touting their new marketingÂ alliance on governance, risk, and complianceÂ (GRC) business processes as a major milestone in their 18-month-old partnership. "This puts together two giants in their fields," Shai Agassi, president, product and technology group at SAP, said during a Wednesday conference call. "It allows us to look at the GRC problem from top down with [SAP's] processes and information, and from the bottom up with [Cisco's] network and infrastructure, and then connect up the dots." The two companies firmly cemented their budding friendship in May 2005 whenÂ Cisco signed up to licenseÂ SAP's service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform known as Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA). Since that time, the vendors have been discussing a variety of areas for cooperation, but the move to team up on GRC announced Wednesday was driven by their customers, according to Doug Merritt, executive vice president and general manager of SAP's suite optimization products and technology group. Some 80 percent of SAP's customers also use Cisco technology. The move brings together SAP's upcoming trio of new GRC applications with Cisco's service-oriented network architecture (SONA), whichÂ debuted in December. SONA aims to link together all the IT resources in an enterprise's network including servers and storage, building more intelligence into the network through the use of services that operate across all the resources. The new SAP products are GRC Repository and GRC Process Control, due out on Nov. 30, and GRC Risk Management expected to ship sometime in December. Cisco hopes to come out with tools and adaptors to make it easier for customers to use the GRC/Sona combination in the same time frame, said Bill Ruh, vice president of advanced services at Cisco. The relationship is initially focused on SAP and Cisco working with customers and partners in the U.S. and Canada, but the vendors plans to expand the deal to include other geographies, Merritt said. When SAP's products appear later this year, they will be available globally. The vendor has yet to release pricing for the new GRC applications and although it's offering them as separate products, Merritt expects them mostly to be bundled with existing GRC applications such as Compliance Calibrator and Firefighter. SAP is planning other third-party vendor partnership announcements around its GRC offerings, but its executives Wednesday kept emphasizing the "unique" nature of the tie-up with Cisco. Over the past four to five months, the two companies have been working on integrating Cisco's network infrastructure with SAP's application infrastructure. They're also defining use cases or real-life scenarios for deploying the GRC/Sona technology combination, Merritt said. So far, the vendors have developed four to five scenarios, in the areas of how best to ensure confidential data like Social Security numbers is not deliberately or inadvertently leaked within or outside a company and around customer support service level agreements. In recent years, SAP has committed to more collaboration with other IT vendors, Merritt said. "SAP has really changed its stripes; that's hard for a grown tiger to do," he added. For the moment, the GRC Repository is full of SAP compliance policies, but the vendor's keen to establish "an open ecosystem" around the product, encouraging vendors and customers to populate the repository themselves. Merritt expects SAP to make a number of additionalÂ GRC announcementsÂ before year-end where customers will commit to help "prime the pump" for content for the repository, he said. Cisco's Ruh agreed. "Within the repository we can see our policies interacting those of our partners and of SAP; there will be a lot of synergies," he added.
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Cisco executives told analysts this week that the company plans to take data center virtualization into areas such as application-aware switching and will partner to provide systems management software.
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As servers and storage start to merge into unified, virtualized systems, Cisco wants to do the same thing with the networks that connect them.
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Promises more collaboration - and about time too... Cisco claims that it is finally getting its act together on security. The company has unveiled a new strategy, called Threat Control and Containment, or TCC, which it said would get its assorted security products working together more effectively.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Intel's move to provide new integration with NAC (network access control) tools in its latest vPro desktop processors could provide interesting opportunities for use with the device authentication systems while further strengthening the technology standards it supports, according to industry watchers. One of a handful of new security features built into the vPro Core 2 Duo chips introduced by Intel on Monday, the added support for the 802.1x standard for NAC and interoperability with Cisco's Network Admission Control guideline -- delivered via the processors' Intel Embedded Trust Agent -- could help accelerate adoption of the device authentication systems while solidifying support for the two formats, experts said. NAC systems are used to scan device and user authentication information whenever a machine attempts to log onto to a network protected by the tools. In addition to protecting against potential break-ins from uninvited outsiders, the tools are also considered a useful alternative for enterprises to employ in segregating access to IT systems shared with partners or contractors. Using the Embedded Trust Agent, Intel said that it can now provide NAC systems -- including any built on the 802.1x or Cisco NAC platforms -- to garner device identity information directly from processor, bypassing the need for the authentication technologies to interact with PC operating system software. One of the potential methods to circumvent NAC systems outlined by security researchers thus far has been to use some method to spoof or misrepresent device information to dupe the network defense tools. By presenting machine identity data on the processor, such attacks could be largely eliminated, Intel officials said. While Intel did not promote direct linkage between Embedded Trust Agent and Microsoft's flavor of NAC -- known as Network Access Protection and already integrated into the software giant's Vista OS -- Cisco and Microsoft have previously announced an agreement to make all of their respective network authentication systems compatible. Similar support for NAC on mobile platforms will arrive with Intel's next batch of Centrino chips, slated for shipment sometime in 2008, said company officials. Cisco officials participating in Intel's vPro launch said that the CPU-level NAC integration could prove to be a significant accelerant to adoption of the technology, which most industry experts have charted as relatively slow thus far, despite the networking giant's claim that many of its customers are tuning on the next-generation authentication systems. "The strength of NAC is certainly based on the reliability of the information that you can present to the network, and having direct access to information on the hardware provides a whole new opportunity that hasn't been present only with OS interaction," said Brendan O'Connell, senior product manager for Cisco's Security Technology Group. "In the past, even with existing NAC systems, what's happened is that when a PC starts up on the network, the security decision is held off while other things are being run in the background, but we're hoping to see that change and get in the door earlier," he said. "There are some big advantages for getting this type of information to present device security posture assessment sooner in the process, both for desktops and down the road for other types of devices." Chip technology providers have attempted to market similar CPU-based security tools -- most notably Phoenix Technologies -- but those efforts have gone largely ignored by customers with Phoenix recently scrapping its core software security products based on insufficient demand. Other third-party NAC technology providers said that Intel's move to embrace NAC should help drive new interest in the systems and codify the industry around the standards it has chosen to support. "On a functional level, this should prove useful by speeding up testing. Instead of waiting for a machine to boot up to get a posture assessment, the NAC system will already recognize the machine's attributes and begin assigning privileges," said Alan Shimel, chief strategy officer for StillSecure, a maker of NAC software. Shimel pointed out that while a nice addition, most NAC systems will still need some form of user identification data, typically provided via software that runs on a device OS, to offer full authentication capabilities. "It will be interesting to see if AMD adopts a similar approach and the same standards; that could have a good effect on the industry as a whole," he said. "It's good to see that Intel is supporting 802.1x because that's the standard most other NAC vendors are working with." While CPU-level integration is a nice addition, some industry watchers maintain it will still be some time before NAC is deployed widely by large numbers of enterprise customers. Because NAC doesn't directly address external threats or efforts to comply with government regulations, such as the Payment Card Industry data security guideline, most companies aren't yet budgeting for NAC tools, said Paul Stamp, analyst with Forrester Research. "The problem with NAC is that in itself it satisfies no compliance mandate directly, and it doesn't protect against any specific type of attack. The real driver for NAC will be when businesses begin to demand so much mobility and collaboration that current security technologies can't meet those goals," Stamp said. "People are struggling to find a driver for NAC right now, and this type of platform-level interaction could be important when they do, but it could be another five years before we see real demand."
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Acquisition is expected to help Cisco Systems reinforce its network management offerings.
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Narus Inc. is moving to help service providers scale up their network security.
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(InfoWorld) - Building a bridge is rarely a quiet affair. Just ask John Augustus Roebling and his son, Washington, whose Brooklyn Bridge took 13 years to complete and cost 27 people their lives. Nevertheless, for the past two years, IT titans Cisco and Microsoft have been engaged in a monumental and more-or-less silent bridge-building effort, as teams of engineers at both companies have worked to join two very different technologies that do the same thing: screen computers for security threats before allowing them to access a corporate network. Last Wednesday, the time had finally come to pull the covers off that integration, which one Cisco executive acknowledged took longer than expected. At The Security Standard conference in Boston, the two companies demonstrated interactions between Vista systems using Microsoftâs NAP (Network Access Protection) and network hardware using Ciscoâs NAC (Network Admission Control) architecture. They also released a white paper describing how the two network access control systems can interoperate and presented a road map for delivering interoperable NAC and NAP products to market. Still, serious questions remain about when interoperable NAC and NAP systems will be available and whether the solution will fit the needs of most enterprise networks. The announcement capped off a two-year integration effort that has been shrouded in mystery. Since saying in October 2004 that they would integrate NAC and NAP, the companies have been sparing with details, prompting speculation that the integration was more PR than reality. Bob Gleichauf, CTO of Ciscoâs security technology group, acknowledged that NAC-NAP integration took longer than the companies planned. However, the official silence about the integration project had more to do with the effort of harnessing resources at two notoriously bottom-line-focused companies than with the technical hurdles of integrating NAC and NAP, he said. Customers who use both Cisco and Microsoft products, and upgrade to both Vista on the desktop and Longhorn Server, will be able to use NAP, NAC, or an integrated NAP-NAC solution for client health screening, Microsoft said. Vistaâs NAP System Health Agent will send system health status reports to Microsoft NPS (Network Policy Server) running on Longhorn. A Cisco Secure ACS (Access Control Server) will instruct the NAP agent on the client system about how to access the network after the health check is complete, according to Gleichauf and Mark Ashida of Microsoft. However, Cisco and Microsoft face tough questioning about how their system will support third-party operating systems, network gear, and point security products. Ashida said Microsoft was focusing on NAC NAP for now but fully intends to support other 802.1x-compliant NAC infrastructure vendors. The benefits of integrated NAC and NAP are at least a year away for enterprises, with Longhorn server months away from availability and widespread adoption of Vista on enterprise desktops also well off in the future, said John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner. Jon Oltsik, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said the Cisco-Microsoft partnership was creating uncertainty in an area that cries out for open standards and multivendor support. âTheyâre treating the symptom but not the disease,â Oltsik said. âUsers want open solutions that support Linux clients and wireless and any kind of switch or router.â The integration between Microsoft and Cisco, while good for those companies, will hinder open standards efforts such as the Trusted Computing Groupâs Trusted Network Connect standard, Oltsik said. âThis is a 1990s solution. Itâs a big step back for client security.â
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Cisco is set to unveil a data-center networking platform that  could take the place of switches that link servers as well as  Fibre Channel devices.