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The Forrester Wave is copyrighted by Forrester Research, Inc. Forrester and Forrester Wave are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. The Forrester Wave is a graphical representation of Forrester's call on a market and is plotted using a detailed spreadsheet with exposed scores, weightings, and comments. Forrester does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in the Forrester Wave. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.

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Independent research firm recognizes Microsoft NAP as a leader in Network Access Control

Microsoft’s Network Access Protection (NAP) solution was cited as a leader, the top category, in a recent independent report, “The Forrester Wave: Network Access Control, Q3 2008.” Forrester placed a lot of emphasis on different access control scenarios for the evaluation, and the different vendors were evaluated around 12 different scenarios as well as strengths across technology, strategy, and market presence.

“Microsoft has the strongest NAC product for managed endpoints,” the report stated. The report goes on to state that even though its official product has only been shipping since the inception of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft has already established itself as a critical thought leader and contributor to the standardizations of NAC.  “Microsoft has the overall highest score among the 12 scenarios we evaluated,” the report added.

NAP enforces health requirements by monitoring and assessing the health of client computers when they attempt to connect or communicate on a network. Client computers that are not in compliance with the health policy can be provided with restricted network access until their configuration is updated and brought into compliance with policy. Depending on how NAP is deployed, noncompliant clients can be quarantined or automatically updated so that users can quickly regain full network access without manually updating or reconfiguring their computers.

NAP helps organizations with:

Health Policy Validation

  • Validate the health of a computer connecting to the network

  • Administrator can set polices to restrict or control access to the network based on the health of the computer

  • Devices that are compliant are allowed access to the network

  • Devices that fail the compliance check are restricted

Health Policy Remediation

  • Computers that do not comply with health policies have limited access until software and configuration updates are completed

  • Non-compliant devices can be automatically updated

  • Specific updates can also be pushed to the device via manual remediation

Post-Connect Compliance

  • Compliant computers connected to the network lose connection if they lose health status

  • Any change of state in the device is reported back to the policy server for post-connect compliance