Some concerns may be overblown, as those who have deployed NAC rate incompatibilities slightly less severely. One even said that NAC increased productivity because it means that users spend less time waiting for IT staff to fix security problems: Instead of sending out a technician, IT can just let quarantine and remediation happen automatically.
When asked about the top three barriers to NAC adoption, a clear majority of both groups picked cost and complexity. There was more division about the third. Planners are put off by other, higher-priority projects or by immaturity of the NAC market, whereas deployers are more likely to complain about an inability to demonstrate clear benefits and ROI to internal stakeholders.
The lack of demonstrable ROI has always been a problem with security spending, but the fact that IT pros who are already spending money on NAC rate it as a more serious problem than those who are not is significant. NAC deployers are also 50 percent more likely than planners to mention lack of senior management buy-in. This lack of enthusiasm is unlikely to stop a NAC deployment in its tracks, but it could derail plans for future security projects.
Part of the problem may be extremely high expectations. As shown in "Prevailing Policies," page 84, network-access policies are becoming more stringent, with every category showing an increase in importance. User identity remains the leading factor, but others are catching up. Group membership showed the largest gain. More than half of respondents now rate the resource being accessed as very important to an access control decision, a consequence of NAC's initial role in many organizations as a means of protecting particularly sensitive data or systems.
Stricter policies lead to an increasing emphasis on NAC products' capabilities. When we asked about factors such as ease of deployment and support for multi-site architectures and different authentication methods, we found that every one had grown in importance since last year. Not only that, but all were more important to deployers than planners.
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