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Endpoint Security: 6 Questions To Ask Before You Buy: Page 8 of 8

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  • A natural place to start is to make use of Microsoft's Active Directory for such a policy repository, and indeed, Microsoft's NAP is designed for such a purpose, with the eventual addition of Longhorn Server and a few other products that are coming later this year. But transforming your own AD implementation may be difficult or impossible, depending on how you have set things up.
  • Another solution is to make use of a third-party vendor such as Lockdown, Trusted Network Technologies or Consentry for such a task, but that may take time to learn how to deploy these solutions and configure them properly.
  • Another alternative is to make use of your anti-virus vendor's central management appliance and build overall endpoint policies on top of these devices: again, this may not be possible depending on how you have configured them to interact with other network components.

    Summary

    As you can see, endpoint security has lots of facets and flaws, and is still very much a work in progress. But answering these questions can help you focus on the most appropriate solutions and narrow down to a reasonable number of vendors to do a final selection process. You also might want to approach things in phases: beginning with securing all remote users first through a VPN and then moving inside the perimeter to handle the local headquarters users.