Steve Smith, MD, Pentura said: “NAC really hasn’t worked. It tried to solve too many problems at once, and set the bar too high. You either had to do a full deployment, or put an appliance in front of your switches, neither of which has gone down well.”

One of the key issues has proven to be the all-or nothing aspect of NAC deployment. The full slew of endpoint and network vendors leaped aboard the bandwagon, but only succeeded in over-hyping the technology, as well as confusing many customers.

Smith continued: “Most enterprises are simply waiting for Cisco to integrate it fully with its boxes, then get it by default. There were an awful lot of organisations who jumped on the bandwagon, but muddied the waters.”

Paul King, Senior Security Advisor, Cisco admitted: “The framework concept just hasn’t been as commercially palatable as the appliance. The box option has had a much better market reception.”

So is NAC dead? It seems that the big-bang approach may well be. The concept of controlling network access is certainly alive and well, but in a very different way to the original architecture blueprint.

However, in spite of the global IT market slowdown , there is still NAC-related activity. Gartner published its first Magic Quadrant assessment of NAC earlier this year, which contained some positive results. The analyst firm estimated that the NAC market grew by 51 per cent in 2008, generating an annual total of $221 million. Predictably, a more recent report from Gartner competitor Frost & Sullivan downgraded this estimate to more than $111.0 million.

In addition, Gartner pointed to the success of pure-play NAC companies such as Bradford Networks, ConSentry and ForeScout, all of which have raised more than $8 million apiece in VC funding recently. Frost & Sullivan in turn estimate that the NAC market will be worth $295.8 million in 2015.

Do you think NAC is a dead-end concept, or a rising star? Let us know...