Almost every organization will go down the network access control (NAC) road for security, access control and network bandwidth management. Cisco and Microsoft, with the release of Vista and Longhorn, will have a serious impact on the uptake, according to Gartner research director Steve Bittinger.

Niche players in the NAC market, Bittinger said, will be quickly eaten up by the "800 pound gorillas" within the near future, using Cisco's recent purchase of network security specialist Meetinghouse Data Communications as a prime example.

Speaking at the Gartner IT Security Summit in Sydney on Tuesday, Bittinger warned extensions to code made by Cisco to the 802.1x (Layer 2) network protocol, as used in some wireless access points and switches, features a proprietary extension to the existing standard; however, all new infrastructure gear should be checked for 802.1x compatibility.

"802.1x is the network protocol now found in a lot of switches and wireless points, which helps implement Layer 2 blocking but does not do everything required in network access control, but it actually does the blocking part," Bittinger said.

"Meetinghouse, another specialist player in the 802.1x software space, helped Cisco phase up the overall NAC picture; now we have AV vendors, software configuration management, and Microsoft at the operating system level offering something to do with NAC.