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Unrivaled Seven-Point Identity Match and Role-Based Policy Enforcement Highlight New Bradford Networks Network Access Control Offering

Concord, NH – Bradford Networks, a leading provider of comprehensive network access control (NAC) solutions, announced today a new product family that gives enterprise network managers the power and flexibility necessary to deploy user-centric, network-based access control. NAC Director™ helps prevent virus outbreaks through endpoint compliance, accurately identifies all users before granting appropriate network access and reacts instantly to control activities that violate usage policy. In a single appliance, NAC Director manages access for any type of network connection – wired, wireless, or virtual private network (VPN).

Bradford’s new NAC Director gives enterprises of all sizes a single, comprehensive product that addresses the three key components of network access control – identity management, endpoint compliance, and usage policy enforcement. NAC Director’s unrivaled seven-point identity match ensures that only authorized users can log into the network and unauthorized users can’t bypass security systems by moving machines or changing the type of connection.

Ideal for use in health care, finance, government, and other public and private organizations, NAC Director’s out-of-band, distributed architecture leverages existing network infrastructures and scales easily from 100 to hundreds of thousands of users and works in multi-vendor, multi-platform environments.

As traditional enterprises become increasingly open and more difficult to manage, NAC becomes more important as a key component to a company’s security infrastructure. Decentralizing organization models, remote offices and workers, VPNs, exploding use of wireless access, the complexities of guest and contractor access, and governmental regulation have created environments that require a single solution to manage, administer, and deploy network access control.

NAC Director builds upon Bradford’s proven Campus Manager NAC solution and expertise developed during four years of securing networks in the wide open education market. The product family brings to rapidly evolving enterprises the security, reliability, and rich feature set that has helped secure hundreds of schools and universities.
NAC Director, priced starting at $6,495, will be generally available in March from Bradford Networks and its worldwide network of channel partners.

“NAC Director’s comprehensive access control capabilities, administrative flexibility, and easy-to-use interface is far ahead of all the products we evaluated,” said Bob Chin, co-founder and EVP, NaviMedix, Inc. a Cambridge, MA, provider of health plan-sponsored administrative services. “Its advanced out-of-band architecture let us integrate it quickly with our high performance, highly redundant network. NAC Director is a superior NAC solution.”

In addition to supporting VPN platforms from Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, NAC Director supports traffic shapers and intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/ IPS) from companies like Packeteer, TippingPoint, and ISS. By accessing the deep packet information from IPS scans, NAC Director can act on real-time information about network activities, such as file sharing and other excess bandwidth utilization. NAC Director also delivers the ability to automatically update user computers with antivirus and antispyware definitions from nearly 40 vendors, including Symantec, McAfee, and Trend Micro.

According to Lawrence Orans, research director, Gartner Inc., today’s enterprise organizations are increasingly complex and NAC is a vital tool for security administrators. “Strong identity management coupled with endpoint security and usage policy enforcement is the comprehensive approach to NAC that will best serve early adopter organizations,” he said

NAC Director addresses the top pain points for corporate network administrators, including:

• Providing guest/contractor access
• Finding and quarantining suspect users
• Preventing infected machines from connecting and spreading viruses
• Enabling users to update non-compliant laptops without using tech support resources
• Tracking user and device connectivity
• Locating missing computers
• Identifying and locating rogue devices
• Generating reports to satisfy regulatory compliance audits

“With our heritage in education – the wildest and most uncontrolled of settings – Bradford has a deep understanding about how to secure networks without impacting the work that needs to be done,” said Michael Gadoury, Bradford Networks founder and chief executive officer. “NAC Director addresses corporate pain points to deliver the highest level of security”
Bradford will demonstrate NAC Director at booth #447 at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, February 5-9.