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NAC: More Is More: Page 5 of 13

So which regulations are driving NAC? The deployers and planners were both most likely to mention SOX, with it farthest ahead among deployers. In general, HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) was the most important regulation for organizations not planning or deploying NAC. This suggests that NAC in its current incarnation can't address many concerns of the health-care industry, which uses many network-connected devices that can't participate in NAC because of their design.

The starkest differences between deployers and organizations with no NAC plans were in SOX and Department of Defense directives, both of which are about twice as likely to apply to organizations already deploying NAC. A look at the survey's demographics shows that deployers have higher revenue and more employees than average, as SOX applies to all public companies.

Many respondents are in government, the aerospace industry and heavily regulated sectors, such as finance. However, overall this year's respondents are from a broader swath of businesses, which suggests that NAC is becoming more widely applicable. The fastest growing sector among both NAC planners and deployers is education, which accounts for one-fifth of all NAC initiatives in our survey. Although most schools and colleges don't have to answer to DoD directives or SOX, they do have a lot of unmanaged devices connecting to their networks.

"We're in a situation where we have to keep our network open, so we have to put a lot more effort into knowing who's in our network at any given time," says the University of Missouri's Brokken.

Protecting wireless computers looked like an important reason for NAC in 2006, and the planner group continued to rate it fourth. For deployers, however, it slipped into seventh place, behind correlation and accounting. And this isn't just because compliance is getting more important. Wireless's close cousin, mobility, is also down sharply: Just 16 percent of deployers rated protecting mobile computers as one of the top three drivers, compared with 29 percent of last year's respondents.