The company will today announce version 3.0 of its CyberGatekeeper security policy enforcement offering, with support for Juniper NetScreen SSL VPNs, iPass VPNs, Airespace, Cisco and Nortel switches, and 802.1x.
CyberGatekeeper is an agent-based endpoint security policy enforcement system. It allows networks to quarantine or deny access to computers that fail to, for example, meet a requisite patch level or virus definition freshness.
Cisco is attempting something similar with NAC, building this kind of endpoint state awareness into its switches and routers, and has secured the support of the three big antivirus firms and Microsoft Corp.
Support for NAC will come at a future date, InfoExpress executive vice president of sales and marketing Todd Nakano said. The company expects to achieve certification once interoperability tests have been completed, he said.
Competing with Cisco is not easy, so InfoExpress hopes it can secure its share of the market by adding value to NAC deployments by enabling broader and more granular types of security policies to be enforced, Nakano said.
All of our customers have some sort of Cisco gear, a lot of them are planning to deploy NAC, he said.
Even before NAC support has been fully built into Cisco kit, such as its enterprise switches, Cisco is already the biggest competitor, bigger than older rivals such as Sygate Technologies Inc, Nakano said.
NAC will likely be specific to Cisco gear too, he said, so InfoExpress hopes to be able to help companies do NAC-like functionality across a broader range of hardware.
The firm plans to support the Trusted Computing Group’s Trusted Network Connect specifications, once there is something to support. The TCG group was set up by Cisco’s competitors, including Foundry and Juniper.
InfoExpress is also supporting Juniper’s JEDI interfaces in the latest version of CyberGatekeeper, allowing integration with NetScreen SSL VPNs.
Version 3.0 also supports 802.1x, the spec for talking doing port-based network access control with switches. The product could already do this same type of access control with hardware that does not support 802.1x, Nakano said.
