Cisco TrustSec and NAC Security Services Built on a Common Identity Framework

Securing corporate networks is an ongoing challenge. Employees have become more mobile and connect to corporate networks via a variety of access mechanisms. Collaboration between employees, partners, and vendors, brings more users onto the network with a different mix of roles and privileges. Add in the growing regulatory compliance needs and one has a much more complex policy-management problem. Cisco has helped customers deal with these issues since its inception starting with Access Control Lists (ACLs) and subsequently through Cisco Identity Based Network Services (IBNS; the next phase of which is called Cisco Identity Based Privilege Networking [IBPN]). More recently, Cisco Network Admission Control (NAC) was developed to allow customers to authenticate on the basis of device "Posture" as well as Identity.