Portnox Wins Award for “Cutting Edge NAC” in 9th Annual Global InfoSec Awards at RSAC 2021

NEW YORK–Portnox is proud to announce it has won the award for “Cutting Edge Network Access Control (NAC)” from Cyber Defense Magazine, the world’s leading information security e-magazine. “We’re thrilled to receive one of the most prestigious and coveted cybersecurity awards in the world from Cyber Defense Magazine. We knew the competition would be tough – after all, the judges are leading infosec experts from around the globe. We couldn’t be more pleased,” said Ofer Amitai, CEO at Portnox.

Portnox’s cloud-delivered NAC-as-a-Service – Portnox CLEAR – has taken the network access control (NAC) market by storm in recent years, seeing a surge of new customers seeking to move off of their legacy on-premise NAC solutions. In 2020, Portnox saw its revenue grow 30% year-over-year.

“As the only true SaaS NAC product on the market, Portnox CLEAR is making NAC implementation and deployment easier for enterprises – particularly those with highly distributed networks,” said Tomer Shemer-Buchbut, Vice President of Products at Portnox. “By eliminating on-going maintenance like upgrades and patches common of on-premise NAC, we’re offering companies far better total cost of ownership.”

“Portnox embodies three major features we judges look for to become winners: understanding tomorrow’s threats, today, providing a cost-effective solution and innovating in unexpected ways that can help stop the next breach,” said Gary S. Miliefsky, Publisher of Cyber Defense Magazine.

With 80 billion connected devices expected to be in use by 2025, the NAC market is growing rapidly – projected to reach nearly $12 billion globally. Device proliferation paired with an ever-expanding number of cyber threats and hybrid workforce operations has made network access control a critical component of any enterprise cybersecurity stack. “NAC is front and center for CISOs and their IT security teams. Expect the demand for network access control – particularly cloud NAC – to continue to grow as companies continue to embrace emerging networking models like SD-WAN, ZTNA and SASE,” said Amitai.

On-Premise NAC vs. SaaS NAC

 

Set-Up & Configuration

Unlike traditional on-premise NAC solutions that require hardware appliances, software, and other on-premise elements, you can create your dedicated instance of Portnox CLEAR cloud-delivered NAC-as-a-Service in minutes.

Portnox CLEAR has been built from the ground up to simplify policy configuration, allowing for deployment timelines that can be measured in hours. In contrast, traditional on-premise NAC deployments can be measured in weeks or months.

Set-Up Costs Eliminated with Portnox CLEAR: Need for on-site appliances, need for third-party expertise, man-hours dedicated to systems training

Savings Value: HIGH

 

Scalability & Performance

As a cloud service, Portnox CLEAR eliminates the need for the capacity planning of on-premise NAC software or appliances. It also eliminates the need to expand capacity or upgrade appliances to meet future growth needs as required by traditional on-premise NAC.

Portnox CLEAR can automatically control the virtual machine size and the scale up or down rules. Dedicated F5 load balancers are spun up as well as auto-scale, so you never have to be concerned with service performance or scalability – it will automatically expand as needed to meet demand.

Performance Costs Eliminated with Portnox CLEAR: Man-hours dedicated to capacity planning, need for on-site appliance upgrades, need for local load balancing

Savings Value: MODERATE

 

Lifecycle Maintenance

Another hidden cost of on-premise is maintenance. All you have to do is search the web – in most cases you’ll find that vendors have lengthy manuals that outline the painful steps and procedures necessary to keep the software or its associated appliances updated.

These upgrades often come with time limits that can force you to start over and re-do your work. Worse yet, one simple mistake during these upgrades can take your network down for many hours or days. And guess what? You often get to go through these upgrades multiple times per year.

With Portnox CLEAR, never worry about software or hardware end-of-life, or costly, complex upgrades requiring hours and days of work and a never-ending checklist of to-dos. As a cloud-delivered service, Portnox CLEAR is always running the most up-to-date version with the latest features and capabilities. At the end of the day, Portnox CLEAR customers enjoy continuous service availability with ZERO lifecycle maintenance costs.

Maintenance Costs Eliminated with Portnox CLEAR: Software upgrades, NAC downtime, need for third-party expertise

Savings Value: HIGH

Founded in 2004 and located in the heart of Cardiff Bay, Wales Millennium Centre (WMC) is Wales’ national arts centre and a major events venue in the region. It seats nearly 2,500 guests, and hosts events ranging from performances by the Welsh National Opera, to concerts, West End musicals, an annual arts festival and more.

Increasingly Cloud-Friendly

WMC has been a long-standing customer of Portnox, having signed on to use Portnox CORE, our on-premise network access control (NAC) solution, in 2012. By early 2020, however, WMC was in the midst an internal push for digital transformation, which focused on adopting cloud technologies in exchange for existing legacy on-premise systems. “Moving from on-prem to cloud is something we’ve begun to undertake over the last year across nearly every system that we use,” said Richard Williams, IT Infrastructure Engineer.

After migrating WMC’s payroll system to the cloud, with several other systems also awaiting migration, Williams and his team began to assess the venue’s current cybersecurity posture. “For a while now, I have been looking at various aspects of security across our business. We’re looking to tighten things up, and much of that has begun with training for staff, such as teaching people to be more aware of phishing emails, etc. It’s now time to begin really assessing the systems we have in place, particularly when it comes to network security,” Williams continued.

As the team turned its focus to its existing network access control capabilities with Portnox CORE, it decided that this component of the cybersecurity stack should also migrate to cloud NAC as part of the WMC’s digital transformation program.

Elevating Network Security

As a public venue, WMC is open to a variety of non-staffers for long periods of time throughout the day. “On a daily basis, we have large numbers of contractors, performers – all kinds of people in the backstage area – and historically we had limited visibility of what was being plugged into our network,” Williams went on to say.

With a number of wired ports located throughout the building, as well as a guest wireless network that was freely accessible, this limited visibility meant that WMC’s network was especially vulnerable and could potentially be breached by anyone with a moderate level of IT know-how.

“While we hadn’t fully leveraged all of the functionality available to us within Portnox CORE, I knew that Portnox CLEAR would be a much better fit for us as an organization after seeing it in action,” Williams stated. “With Portnox CLEAR, we can simply login and see exactly who is on the network, via which access layer, their device type, etc. We have much more visibility and control today as a result.”

Better Agility & Visibility in Times of Crisis

As the Coronavirus pandemic unexpectedly swept the globe in the early months of 2020, WMC’s choice to transition to Portnox CLEAR’s cloud NAC yielded a surprising benefit. “As a public events venue that had to shut its doors for several months due to the pandemic, we were forced to downsize our staff and send most of the remaining workforce home to continue operations,” Williams went on to say.

With an uncharacteristically large remote team, Williams and his colleagues were able to extend Portnox CLEAR’s NAC capabilities to the organization’s VPN access layer, ensuring that the corporate network, resources and various enterprise cloud applications were being accessed by remote staff in a secure manner.

Future-Proofed for Whatever Lays Ahead

While the future for nearly every organization remains uncertain as the pandemic drags on, Williams and WMC are confident that Portnox CLEAR will continue to deliver the needed stability, visibility and control it requires to keep its network safe. “From the end-user’s point-of-view, Portnox CLEAR is very stable. My team connects to CLEAR first thing in the morning, and simply disconnects at the end of each day. Now, we always know what’s happening on the network. There are no blind spots,” Williams explained.

With Portnox CLEAR cloud NAC, WMC is future-proofed for any new network security challenges that lie ahead, thanks to the platform’s superb uptime, on-going upgrades, and flexibility to manage from anywhere if needed.

What it takes to properly secure corporate networks in the world of remote work, BYOD & IoT

The workplace has changed thanks to COVID-19. Many of us continue to spend most, if not all, of our workdays at home, juggling Zoom meetings, kids, pets, relationships, cooking, cleaning…you name it. Since at least February 2020, organizations around the world have altered the way they operate – encouraging their employees to stay home, stay safe, but stay available.

On top of the immediate operational challenges that companies faced when shifting to full or hybrid work environments, the rise of remote work in response to COVID-19 has pushed a number of network security shortcomings to the surface. In response, cybersecurity vendors and IT professionals have accelerated the development of and search for solutions to fill these network security gaps.

As we return to the office and arrive in a post-COVID-19 world, these areas will dominate the evolutionary direction of corporate network security…

The Role of Identity

As people, we represent the weakest link in the network security armor. While we may wish we were infallible, we’re really full of bad cybersecurity habits, like weak passwords, forgetting to back up data, or clicking on hyperlinks in emails from strangers. Our identities, however, can also be our strongest means of securing networks. The rise of multi-factor authentication (MFA) identity and access management (IAM) tools is allowing organizations to verify employee identity and authenticate their access to the network in real-time, no matter the employee’s location or whether they’re attempting to connect with a managed or personal (BYOD) device.

Network Segmentation

Segmenting the network is a cybersecurity best practice. Period. For any companies, this practice is even a regulatory requirement (e.g., the Payment Card Industry data security standard (PCI)). Network segmentation is simply a means of dividing up a network into smaller parts, ensuring the right people only have access to the parts of the network that are relevant to them. It is a measure that improves the effectiveness of an organization’s investments in other security tools, and can help to prevent significant damage to critical data across the network after a company has experienced a breach.

Securing the Edge

Gartner introduced SASE a few years ago. It represents a new enterprise networking technology category that converges the functions of network and security solutions into a single, unified cloud service. This marks an architectural transformation, as it allows IT teams to leverage a holistic and flexible service to their businesses. Critical to this budding area is NAC. Specifically, the movement of NAC to the cloud eliminates expensive on-site hardware and hidden maintenance costs. With cloud NAC, like Portnox CLEAR, all that’s needed to control network access across a geographically dispersed network is an internet connection.

AbsoluteCare is a fast-growing regional integrated healthcare provider headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, with facilities up and down the East Coast, including Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. Since 2000, AbsoluteCare has provided medical assessment and treatment to tens of thousands of people through its “wrap-around” care model.

“Several years ago, as the company continued to grow, many of our customers, including companies like Anthem and BlueCross BlueShield said we needed to be HITRUST certified in order to work with them,” said Chris Becker, AbsoluteCare’s National IT Director. As part of that journey towards HITRUST certification, Becker and his team discovered that they would need to implement a network access control (NAC) solution.

“At that time, we looked at HP Aruba ClearPass and Cisco ISE, and decided to go with Aruba,” Becker continued. “We spent quite a bit of money to get it implemented – relying on outside consultants to get it up and running and conduct training – it’s a rather large application. We ultimately used it minimally because much of the functionally was overly complex.”

In general, the company utilizes managed corporate devices across its workforce, specifically Dell laptops running Windows X, as well as a number of iPads and iPhones. “We have a small population of BYOD, but we don’t encourage it – it’s just more work to manage the compliance of those devices with the limited internal IT resources we have,” Becker stated.

Migration Challenges

In the summer of 2020, AbsoluteCare found itself in a bind during a datacenter migration. “We decided to move our Aruba servers from one datacenter to another, and we found out – oh my gosh – this is going to cost us like $30,000 just to move it,” continued Becker. The hidden costs didn’t end with just the migration, however. Becker and his team realized they would have to incur more fees to upgrade ClearPass because the version was nearly three years old.

“We saw dollar signs. Lots of dollar signs. Not only that, but ClearPass really didn’t grow with us – you almost have to be an HP Aruba expert to really make the solution work for you the way you need it to,” Becker recalled.

Headed in a Different Direction

To avoid paying staggering professional services fees for the expertise needed to execute the ClearPass server transfer, Becker and his team opted to go out in search for a new NAC solution that would eliminate these hidden costs and provide a lightweight, flexible option for network access control.

“We definitely wanted cloud. We’re fans of cloud – both private and public,” Becker indicated. “Portnox CLEAR definitely fit the core requirement to act as our NAC solution, but it also offered other benefits through its optional agent that made it the clear winner for us.”

Out With the Old, In With the New

AbsoluteCare was able to swiftly roll out Portnox CLEAR with its AgentP add-on, allowing Becker and his team to leverage the platform’s on-or-off network endpoint risk posture assessment and automatic device remediation capabilities for users on its wired and wireless networks.

“This is one of the things I really liked about Portnox,” said Becker. “When we initially got access to the environment to conduct our proof of concept, we set up our account and then set a meeting for a week out to assess where we were and what we still needed to do. Well, my systems admin basically got everything configured in a few days all on his own.”

For AbsoluteCare, Portnox CLEAR’s ease of use was a major selling point. “I mean, coming off of something like ClearPass, where you basically need to be a systems engineer to figure it out – Portnox CLEAR was just a piece of cake,” Becker reveled…

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