SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO - News) today announced extensions to its Cisco Clean Access product family with the introduction of the Cisco Clean Access Out-of-Band solution. This Network Admission Control (NAC) appliance integrates within a switching infrastructure to provide a self-contained, rapidly deployable solution for automatically detecting, isolating, and cleaning infected or vulnerable devices that attempt to access the network.

The availability of the Cisco Clean Access Out-of-Band solution broadens customers NAC technology deployment options. Customers can choose to deploy NAC functionality either through the NAC industry-collaborative framework or through the Cisco Clean Access product family. Cisco Clean Access Out-of-Band extends this flexibility and Cisco's leadership by offering multiple network admission control deployment options for organizations of any size.

"With the addition of Cisco Clean Access Out-of-Band, organizations can take advantage of their high-speed switched network infrastructures to deploy network admission control capabilities and maximize the reach of the security policy enforcement," said Arvin Babu, director of engineering in the Security Technology Group (STG) at Cisco Systems. "Customers now have a high-performance, turnkey solution that provides network access authentication, posture assessment, and remediation combined with high performance."

"Cisco Clean Access Out-of-Band gives us much greater flexibility and is easy to deploy," said Robin Manke-Cassidy, technology support principal for Arizona State University's information technology department. "We can use all of our existing networking tools to manage and maintain our network and easily scale up the number of users and networks that are protected by the Clean Access product/product family. In terms of performance, the out-of-band version allows us to take advantage of our high-speed Cisco-based switching and routing infrastructure."

Cisco Systems Inc.