Cornered!
Cornered! is a blog devoted, most of the time anyway, to telecommunications: local and global issues, technology, people and trends from the perspective of someone who's been reporting, analysing and commenting on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition). Sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes frivolous. Controversial, analytical, informative, amusing, but never boring; a vehicle for examinations of important issues and observations on my encounters and experiences in an industry where polarised views and hyperbole are the norm.
Follow the Australian Telecommunications scene NEWSLETTER- FREE TRIAL

Blog

Technology news and Jobs arrow Cornered! arrow Is this the answer to Internet security?
Is this the answer to Internet security? E-mail
by Stuart Corner   
Friday, 07 December 2007
The announcement by Cisco this week of its new TrustSec role-based security architecture has thrown the spotlight on an increasing important area of network security that one day could eliminate, at source many of the problems with today's public Internet. Scot Janey, from Cisco's rival, Juniper Networks, explains.
According to Janey, director of emerging technologies with Juniper Networks Australia and New Zealand (speaking to iTWire a week before Cisco announced TrustSec) the technology is called different things by different vendors. "We call it Universal Access Control, Microsoft calls it Network Access Protocol and Cisco calls it Network Admission Control...Today UAC means many different things to different people...and there are a lot of vendors trying to play in this space...We believe it is about pre-admission controls and guest user access and then, once people are logged on, determining dynamically where they can go in the network and what type of access they have."

According to Janey, UAC is all about enabling any user to have access to a network so as to give that user as much functionality as company policy and security concerns allow. So, for example a universal access control implementation would enable a visitor/outside contractor to walk into an enterprise facility, log in to the corporate WiFi network and access the public Internet, but no part of the corporate intranet.

A key enabler of this in Juniper's universal access control system is technology which checks the visitor's laptop and confirms that it is free of malware and that all key software: operating system, antivirus etc is up to date. If it is not, the system will instruct the user, an enable them to, install the required upgrades. Juniper, according to Janey, is able to deliver "automatic remediation for pretty much any brand of security software: we can download the latest patch or antivirus definition file."

Janey said that implementation of Juniper's UAC technology would have prevented the recent massive data security breach in the where a junior Government official shipped by courier two DVDs containing confidential details of 25 million UK residents, which were then lost in transit. "With universal access control that junior official would have been authorised to view that data but not to burn it to disc. That is what universal access control is all about."

 
< Next story in category   Previous story in the category >
iTWire user statistics Visitors last 30 days
694,279
Subscribers 15,210
#1 independent technology news advertise here
  •   *  
  • Search
  • AdvSeach
  • Login
  • Events
  • FreeStuff

- Advertisement -

Featured Whitepapers

Cornered! - Telecoms blog
Cornered! is a blog on all things tele-communication from the perspective of one who has observed, analysed commented and reported on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition).
Follow iTWire on Twitter

About iTWire

iTWire is all about technology news, information, jobs and community for the IT and telecommunications industry professional. Subscribe to our free ICT daily newsletter