Is this the answer to Internet security?

by Stuart Corner

Friday, 07 December 2007

Page 1 of 2 ! 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." << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

< Next story in category		Previous story in the category >

Visitors last 30 days Suscribers

904,266 13,751