Recently I briefed with ForeScout Technologies, a Network Admission/Access Control (NAC) vendor, to get an update on the CounterACT platform it has been delivering and developing for a few years and to see its recently announced ControlFabric technology. I thought it wise to take another look at NAC vendors and how they address BYOD, rogue, or non-compliant devices that can be the source of many compliance and security headaches including advanced/targeted threats.
I am impressed by ForeScout’s solutions for a couple of reasons.
1) Customers in numerous verticals say that ForeScout’s technology is not only easy to deploy but post deployment, many begin receiving useful results in as little as a few hours. By using an agentless/ agent optional approach and offering centralized and distributed deployment, customers avoid updating endpoints or upgrading infrastructure saving numerous man-hours.
2) CounterACT has great scalability. It addresses the needs of SMEs, small to medium enterprises, as well as having some of the largest NAC deployments, some of which exceed 800,000 devices.
3) ForeScout is infrastructure vendor agnostic. It has produced APIs for bi-directional integration with over 65 technology vendors including network, SIEM, endpoint, NGFW and MDM creating ControlFabric. The Company also provides other vendors, resellers, and customers an Open Integration Module for developing custom integration, increasing the customers’ return on investment (ROI) for CounterACT, ControlFabric and their existing infrastructure.
4) ControlFabric provides accelerated remediation by enabling an information exchange to more efficiently mitigate a wide variety of network, security and operational issues. A key factor in an optimized layered security model is that all of the layers must work cooperatively to provide the desired stronger defense. The bi-directional content exchange through ControlFabric allows CounterACT to invoke the desired enforcement decisions in real time.
Impacted by multiple factors such as network size, complexity and budget impacts, organizations do not have sufficient staff to manually manage and execute response management, making controls automation a business imperative. ForeScout delivers solutions that fill the ever-increasing need for real-time visibility into activities and delivers appropriate automated remediation responses. With the combination of these features, ForeScout demonstrates its leadership in the NAC space, delivering a highly competitive and extensible solution set with CounterACT and ControlFabric.
