Cisco ACS and Access Control Rescue Plan

Has your Cisco Solution left you stranded?

When Cisco ACS was first introduced to support a growing dial-up market, Bill Clinton was in office, eBay was a venture backed start-up, and David Letterman just started using Top 10 lists. Since then, networks have dramatically changed and identity-based network access security has become a best practice for many in order to globally manage user's wireless and wired access privileges, a variety of new endpoints, and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives.

Cisco ACS has endured a string of upgrades that require new licenses recently, which has created an opportunity for customers to evaluate new solutions. Cisco's announcement of the new ISE platform also makes the Cisco ACS roadmap fairly cloudy.

If considering Cisco's NAC solution it doesn't help that it is a patchwork of products that primarily rely on Cisco ACS for authentication. The overall Cisco solution lacks key administrator and operational features, and suffers from scalability and interoperability issues stemming from the lack of a cohesive approach. Emerging 802.1X network authentication, combined with NAC enforcement for a large variety of endpoints, has outstripped the capabilities of the current-generation Cisco ACS RADIUS server.

Avenda Systems addresses these growing concerns by supporting features and capabilities in a single platform that exceed what is provided in the combined Cisco ACS and NAC solution. Ease of use, large scale deployment features, and a cost structure that makes sense easily supports up to tens of thousands of users, as well as emerging enterprises.

Here's a sample of the Top 10 Reasons to consider for migrating from Cisco ACS and NAC solutions

10.  Managing devices from multiple Cisco product groups is becoming a burden

 9.  Performance requirements that exceed the scalability of ACS and Cisco NAC

 8.  Cisco-only vendor and protocol support

 7.  Policy model with little or no flexibility

 6.  Lack of support for today's advanced usage scenarios

To find out how we solve all 10 issues, please visit our website to review our whitepaper entitled Simplifying A Complex Cisco Access Control Solution . To learn more about Avenda's RADIUS functionality, visit our Next Generation RADIUS for Today's Networks page.

Avenda's Cisco migration program provides a generous trade-in for legacy ACS devices and a Migration Assistance Service which includes training and deployment assistance. Contact us at sales@avendasys.com to bring your network access security back on the road.