Filter
Top Products
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2005, 2007. All rights reserved. ix
Preface
In February of 2004, IBM® announced that it would be joining Cisco’s Network
Admission Control
(NAC) program. In December of 2004, IBM released its first
offering for the Cisco NAC program in the form of the IBM Tivoli® compliance and
remediation solution. In June of 2005 the first edition of this IBM Redbook was
published.
A number of subsequent updates from Cisco have changed the dynamics of the
Network Access Control market, and have led to significant changes by IBM to
our compliance and remediation solution. Foremost amongst these new
developments are the release of Cisco’s Phase 2 Network Admission Control
architecture, the addition of the NAC Appliance to Cisco’s offerings, and the
addition of Tivoli Configuration Manager as a remediation component of the
overall solution.
While this second edition addresses these changes, the fundamental concept
and business value of the solution remain relatively constant and are preserved
with minimal changes from the first edition. In contrast, the technical and
implementation details have significantly changed and are of great interest to
those who have read the first edition.
It is important to realize what is the compliance and remediation solution. It is not
a one-size-fits-all product that will work out-of-the-box for customers. It is an
integrated solution comprised of three products that are very powerful in their
own right. As such, there is no individual product manual that can properly
capture all of the techniques and practices that must be developed in order to
properly deploy this solution.
A typical product manual is analogous to an automobile owner’s manuals in that
it tells you a wealth of information about your product but it does not tell you how
to apply your product in practice, just as an automobile owner’s manual does not
teach you how to drive or how to navigate. This redbook serves as a high-level
guide for designing and deploying the solution in various business scenarios. It
teaches you how to
drive and navigate the compliance and remediation solution.
Note that the IBM Integrated Security Solution for Cisco Networks, referenced
numerous times in this book, is a portfolio of solutions that also includes Tivoli’s
identity management solution for Cisco network access. This book does not
address the identity-based solution, so any references to the IBM Integrated
Security Solution for Cisco Networks in this book actually refers to the
compliance and remediation parts of the solution.