more tecnology to evaluation

Having deployed a fairly large Mirage NAC implementation covering 10 locations with endpoints totaling in the neighborhood of 7,000 +, I have to agree with the authors comment that the Mirage solution is very powerful, however from an administrative overhead perception I have to disagree. The solution requires no more administrative overhead than any other network solution such as firewalls, switching equipment, IPS. There is probably 1-3 hours a week spent on the care and feeding of this solution which is in line with time currently spent say on desktop ant virus and far less than say desktop patch management.

Compliance checking is a huge benefit for companies utilizing outside contractors carrying their own equipment prior to allowing them to access the corporate network, this combined with the “post-connect” capabilities that crawl into the IPS space have been the most successful leverage we have seen from the solution. Through use of the Mirage solution I have actually spent less “administrative overhead” in various areas such as third party compliance due to the automated compliance checks and capabilities to make it user self service for resolving their issues in order to gain access to my corporate resources.

It all comes down to the deployment methodology utilized. The Mirage solution is very easy to deploy and I can bring up a new site in a matter an hour or 2 and depending on how aggressive you choose to be the site can be protected by Access Control quickly or simply monitored until you are ready to throw the switch. I would highly recommend anyone considering a NAC implementation to do a proof of concept from a number of vendors including Mirage to determine the real strengths of the products.

I also disagree with the author concerning the administration overhead of the Mirage NAC solution. I have quite a large install spanning 14 countries and including over 25 sensors. What I have found is that the out of the box configurations for thresholds, profiles, and access zones are perfect to satisfy most installation requirements. With some minor configuration changes, one is able to maximize the out of box configuration to suite the requirement exactly.

I have been using the Mirage solution for about 4 years and have seen this product mature and come into its own as the hands down leader in the NAC space. The usability of the Mirage Operations Console is unparalleled to any other application my team uses in its administration and management of a large enterprise network.

The best part for me personally is the fact that this application is a set it and forget it type of application. What I mean by this is I find myself not having to hand feed anything in order to keep the installation running at top performance. It is a very stable platform that just plain works.

Thanks.