6/29/2004 -- Last week, Cisco extended its Network Admission Control (NAC) security program to additional routing and switching platforms. In addition, the networking giant announced new consulting services designed to help customers deploy NAC solutions.

Cisco launched NAC last November in conjunction with anti-virus vendors Network Associates, Symantec, and Trend Micro. IBM has since joined the program, as well. Cisco positioned NAC as a means to mitigate the potential impact of worms and viruses by enforcing access privileges at the router level.

For the record, Cisco announced that the NAC program now supports its 830 Series through Cisco 7200 Series access -- along with its midrange IOS-based routing -- platforms.

Cisco also announced that its Cisco Trust Agent software -- which is deployed on desktop and server endpoints and collects security state information from antivirus clients and other third-party security applications -- is available integrated with the Cisco Security Agent, a Cisco offering that’s designed to ensure endpoint-operating-system patch compliance.

As if that’s not enough, Cisco introduced a NAC vendor integration program, which exposes select APIs – such as the programming interfaces for Cisco’s Trust Agent -- to third-party software vendors. The goal, Cisco officials say, is to increase the range of industry solutions that are NAC-enabled.

Finally, Cisco positions its Advanced Services NAC implementation consulting services as an integrated set of planning, design and implementation offerings, including NAC Readiness Assessment services; NAC Limited Deployment services (which lets organizations install a limited NAC deployment to test features and gain experience); NAC Design Development services (which enables organizations to develop a NAC design specification for a corporate-wide deployment; and NAC Implementation Engineering (which provides onsite installation, configuration, testing and tuning of NAC components).

Over time, officials say, Cisco will extend NAC support to additional platforms including, switching and remote access/VPN product offerings. -Stephen Swoyer