Centralised policy management and robust access control provided to Haworth furniture suppliers with CounterACT from ForeScout
ForeScout Technologies has announced that Haworth, an office furniture designer and manufacturer, has deployed the CounterACT family of NAC appliances as part of its global security initiative. According to Ann Harten, Vice President of Global Information Services at Haworth: 'Our global IT presence is comprised of a central security hub in our US headquarters that manages IT locations in China, India, Canada/Quebec and throughout Europe. We knew the right NAC solution would further our ability to pinpoint and treat real network access threats in real-time on an as-needed / per-case basis, reducing management overhead. After evaluating several NAC solutions, we chose CounterACT: it offered the levels of control we needed and integrated quickly and seamlessly with our existing heterogeneous network. We deployed the CounterACT appliances worldwide and began to perform centralised policy management in days, not weeks.' CounterACT combines clientless network access control (NAC) and signatureless intrusion prevention to ensure all connected and connecting devices are in compliance with network security policies and are free of self-propagating threats. CounterACT seamlessly integrates into any network environment without requiring costly upgrades or infrastructure changes, and enables enterprises to tailor enforcement actions to match the level of policy violations, ensuring user disruption only occurs when it is warranted or required by the IT staff. In addition to traditional security issues, today’s enterprises like Haworth face a steady influx of vulnerabilities introduced by contractors, guests and mobile/home employees who are able to bypass physical security and gain network connection inside the perimeter defences. CounterACT addresses this problem by enforcing network security policies across all managed and unmanaged network devices, including desktops and laptops as well as non-OS devices such as VoIP phones, handhelds and network printers, without the need for a software agent of any kind. 'With CounterACT, policy compliance management is greatly simplified. CounterACT offers global enterprises like Haworth the policy writing tools needed to speed centralised enforcement and remediation at the group, user or device level, and in the localised languages,' said Gord Boyce, president of ForeScout. 'Using CounterACT’s policy management tools, IT personnel can detect threats worldwide in real-time then draft and push highly granular policies, tailoring enforcements to match the level of violations so that they protect user productivity but minimise user disruption.' |
