11.4. Professional Services and Consulting

NAC is much more than a simple drop-in appliance or product. More than any other security technology that you've worked with in the past, NAC spans your entire infrastructure (depending on the extent to which you choose to deploy it), and it requires a tight coordination between many elements of the network and (just as importantly) many different teams or stakeholders.

Because customers often perceive a NAC deployment as complex, many value-added resellers, consulting firms, managed service providers, and security professionals have developed practices around deployment of NAC. You might decide to outsource some or all of your NAC deployment to these professionals, which gives you access to their professional experience with deploying NAC.

The extent to which you involve these professionals depends on how comfortable you are with the various phases and tasks associated with the NAC deployment:

• You might take on a consultant to deal with only NAC agent deployment on your desktop systems.

• You might require consulting services to help design your policies for access control and endpoint assessment.

Regardless, working with a NAC specialist ensures that your deployment goes smoothly and cost-effectively, with as little impact as possible on the end user and the internal teams who are designing and managing the NAC solution.