Adding 'context' to control set to accelerate revenue growth

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Network Access Control (NAC) Global Market, finds that the market earned revenues of $592.5m in 2015 and estimates this to reach $1.83bn by 2020. Revenue growth is outpacing the growth in unit shipment, indicating that the monetary value of contracts won by NAC vendors is rising.

Christopher Kissel, Research Analyst, Digital Transformation, Frost & Sullivan, commented: “While endpoint visibility provides crucial information about corporate assets, specialised devices, their location and the security posture of endpoints, bidirectional integration helps build a stronger cyber network foundation. With true endpoint visibility and improved posture assessment, NAC is able to give context to controls and lastly, network orchestration allows NAC to be the central console of IT and security operations.”

Unlike in the past when network administrators and security teams had the luxury of managing devices through Ethernet and stateful firewalls, a modern business network must account for transient devices, remote branch offices and contract and guest registrations. In such an environment, NAC is proving highly relevant as pre-registration of devices onto a network is one of its important features. It benefits all the network phases of IT, operations and security.

However, NAC solutions are generally deployed in mature network and security environments. Companies have their own Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Vulnerability Management (VM) and other cyber perimeter tools that create security blind spots. Additionally, the teams must find a way to protect network access even as the network security surface expands.

Despite these issues, companies prefer to deploy NAC platforms for its superior endpoint visibility. There is a marked growth in the number of NAC deployments as enterprise and medium-sized market networks become larger to include more devices per employee and Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD).

“Beyond greenfield market opportunities, the market is also experiencing organic growth as companies migrate from first-generation NAC features to next-gen NAC capabilities,” added Kissel. “When contracts come up for renewals, clients often demand richer feature sets including endpoint posture assessment and risk-based probability, which offers vendors a plethora of opportunities to upsell.”

Overall, instead of simply imposing rules and role-based access controls, NAC platforms are integrating and improving other security tools, helping provide fidelity for risk-based analytics, and facilitating contextual awareness for security incident and forensics investigations. These benefits have resulted in truly next-gen NAC platforms that open up opportunities for revenue growth.