Keeping your remote laptops healthy is not an easy task these days. Infections are everywhere, and once these PCs leave the shelter of your enterprise network, they can easily get filled with malware, rootkits, and viruses.

To help stem this tide, various endpoint security vendors have created solutions that take the form of appliances to assess laptop and other endpoint health. The hard part is in understanding how they differentiate their wares and what are the consequences for how they interact with your network infrastructure.

In this story for SearchNetworking.com called “NAC underneath the covers”, I put together a brief guide of questions you need to ask your vendor, and understand where these solutions fit into your overall networking and security infrastructures.