Having deployed a fairly large Mirage NAC implementation covering 10 locations with endpoints totaling in the neighborhood of 7,000 +, I have to agree with the authors comment that the Mirage solution is very powerful, however from an administrative overhead perception I have to disagree. The solution requires no more administrative overhead than any other network solution such as firewalls, switching equipment, IPS. There is probably 1-3 hours a week spent on the care and feeding of this solution which is in line with time currently spent say on desktop ant virus and far less than say desktop patch management.

Compliance checking is a huge benefit for companies utilizing outside contractors carrying their own equipment prior to allowing them to access the corporate network, this combined with the “post-connect” capabilities that crawl into the IPS space have been the most successful leverage we have seen from the solution. Through use of the Mirage solution I have actually spent less “administrative overhead” in various areas such as third party compliance due to the automated compliance checks and capabilities to make it user self service for resolving their issues in order to gain access to my corporate resources.

It all comes down to the deployment methodology utilized. The Mirage solution is very easy to deploy and I can bring up a new site in a matter an hour or 2 and depending on how aggressive you choose to be the site can be protected by Access Control quickly or simply monitored until you are ready to throw the switch. I would highly recommend anyone considering a NAC implementation to do a proof of concept from a number of vendors including Mirage to determine the real strengths of the products.