Cisco's oneNAC announcement (see here, here and here) brings bad news to customers; buy Cisco NAC appliances now,
while you perform expensive network infrastructure upgrades, for a Cisco NAC
framework that no longer delivers the multi-vendor solutions it once promised.
Is Cisco
announcing oneNAC to save face for the beleaguered and largely undelivered C-NAC
Framework? I think so,
as C-NAC has lost much of its luster. Customers discovered C-NAC really entails
huge network upgrade costs, a NAC solution not ready for primetime, and a
framework that doesn't bring solutions from the cadre of industry partners Cisco
promised. Partners who joined the C-NAC program ended up competing against Cisco
rather than delivering joint solutions to customers, essentially making C-NAC an
all Cisco solution, other than support for some anti-virus products.
Frankly,
there only looks to be two significant benefits to customers in the oneNAC
announcement from my
perspective; reduce two Cisco agents (Clean Access agent and Cisco
Trust Agent) down to one (tbd), and reduce two policy managers (Cisco ACS and
Clean Access Manager) down to one (tbd). One other possibility could be making a
Cisco NAC solution more scalable than the current NAC Appliances but its unclear
yet as to whether this would be addressed.
The benefit
to Cisco of course is
they no longer speak two conflicting NAC messages, one about the C-NAC Framework, and a
second for the NAC Appliance/Clean Access/Perfigo solution, resolving a long
standing inconsistency since Cisco acquired Perfigo as their short term
alternative to the C-NAC Framework.
What oneNAC
won't likely solve are the broken relationships Cisco has left with other NAC
solution providers who participated in the C-NAC Framework program, paid money to have
their products certified, and then found themselves competing against
Cisco's NAC Appliance/Clean Access products. Those experiences pretty much leave
the promise of a Cisco NAC partner ecosystem as unlikely of an event as a George
Bush comeback.
Net-net:
The benefits here are largely for Cisco to try to save face and clean up their NAC split personality. The benefits C-NAC once promised will
most likely remain unfulfilled.
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