Fortinet FortiNAC vs Sophos Network Access Control comparison

Fortinet's FortiNAC is a network access control solution that provides visibility, control, and automated response for everything that connects to the network, enhancing the security fabric. FortiNAC protects against Internet of Things (IoT) threats, extends control to third-party devices, and orchestrates automated responses to a variety of networking events.

Using many information and behavior sources, FortiNAC delivers extensive profiling of even headless devices on your network, allowing you to precisely identify what's on your network.

You can change the configurations of switches and wireless equipment from more than 70 vendors to implement micro-segmentation regulations. You can also extend the security fabric's reach in diverse contexts.

With FortiNac, you can respond in seconds to events in your network to stop attacks from spreading. When the relevant behavior is seen, FortiNAC offers a rich and customized set of automation policies that can rapidly trigger configuration changes.

Fortinet FortiNAC Features

Fortinet FortiNAC has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Agent or agentless (automated) scanning of the network for device detection and classification

• Generates a list of all the devices on the network.

• Evaluates the risk of each network endpoint.

• Consolidates the architecture to make deployment and management easier

• Gives wide support for third-party network devices to maintain compatibility with current network infrastructure,

• Automates the process of onboarding a large number of endpoints, users, and visitors.

• Enables network segmentation and enforces dynamic network access restriction.

• Reduces the time it takes to contain a problem from days to seconds.

• Reduces investigation time by reporting events to SIEM with detailed contextual data.

Fortinet FortiNAC Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing DX Spectrum. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Automatic response: FortiNAC will continuously monitor the network, analyzing endpoints to ensure they meet their profile. FortiNAC will rescan devices to verify that MAC-address spoofing does not compromise the security of your network access. FortiNAC can also keep an eye out for unusual traffic patterns. The FortiGate appliances are used in conjunction with this passive anomaly detection. When a compromised or vulnerable endpoint is identified as a threat, FortiNAC initiates a real-time automatic response to confine the endpoint.
  
  
• Total device visibility: FortiNAC monitors the entire network and provides total visibility. FortiNAC searches your network for users, applications, and devices. FortiNAC may then profile each element based on observed attributes and reactions, as well as drawing on FortiGuard's IoT Services, a cloud-based database for identification look-ups, using up to 21 distinct techniques.

• Dynamic network management: Once the devices and users have been identified, FortiNAC allows for extensive network segmentation to allow devices and users access to critical resources while preventing unauthorized access. FortiNAC employs dynamic role-based network access control to conceptually establish network segments by grouping similar applications and data together to restrict access to a certain set of users and/or devices. If a device is compromised in this way, its capacity to travel through the network and target other assets is constrained. FortiNAC assists in the protection of sensitive data and assets while maintaining compliance with internal, industry, and government standards and directives. Assuring the integrity of devices before they join the network reduces the chance of malware spreading.

Reviews from Real Users

Fortinet FortiNAC stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its robust network segmentation and its device visibility. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

A Senior Proposal Manager at a tech services company writes of the solution, “The network segmentation is the most important part of the solution. The integration with the Zero Trust Access solution is a crucial part of segmenting your network.”

Eranjaya K., Security Engineer at Eguardian lanka, notes, “We use Fortinet FortiNAC to receive excellent visibility of our network for traffic and what devices are connected to prevent attacks.” He adds, “I have found Fortinet FortiNAC to be scalable.”

Sophos NAC Provides comprehensive, easy-to-deploy network access control that protects enterprise networks from the threats posed by non-compliant, compromised, or misconfigured endpoint computers. The software solution is vendor-neutral and works with existing network infrastructure and security applications. Computers are permitted or denied access to the network, based on a centrally defined, policy-driven assessment - and isolated, quarantined for remediation, automatically remediated, or sent alerts. Administrators can define and manage policies uniquely for managed and guest computers, including checking their security status and ensuring that no unwanted applications are run.