This newsletter has made the point before that NAC can be used to help meet industry and government security regulations, and ForeScout is trying to make that process easier.

The latest version of its CounterACT NAC software includes what the company calls a PCI Compliance Kit. It doesn’t pretend to meet all the regulations set down by the payment card industry; no one product by any vendor does that.

However, there are aspects of the PCI regulations that NAC can help meet and the compliance kit helps with that. To be exact, ForeScout says it can help meet eight out of 12 requirements of the PCI data security standard.

Some of these features existed in the product before. For instance, it was possible to check whether firewalls were in place to regulate the flow of customer data. Now that feature is packaged with similar PCI compliance features, labeled as such and preconfigured.

Other features such as reports that gather security data of interest to PCI auditors have been added to CounterACT as part of the compliance kit. It also includes a wizard to walk customers through the PCI configuration.

ForeScout claims that at least one customer has already used the kit to produce reports that were part of a successful PCI audit.

Networks have their own quirks and network executives will have their own spin on how to meet PCI regulations, and that may or may not include NAC. But if it does, a tool like the compliance kit can make the process simpler.

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.