We’ve been tracking the network access control market via our yearly reader poll since 2006, and we haven’t gotten bored yet. NAC is an expensive, complex technology with a large and ever-shifting slate of vendors and more competing standards than John McCain has houses. But it’s also the best way we’ve found thus far to banish rogue and infected devices from your network while obeying compliance standards, so you can finally free your information security group to focus on risk management and next-generation threats.

Among the nearly 500 business technology professionals who answered our third annual InformationWeek Analytics NAC survey, cost and complexity led the list of adoption barriers. Capital costs can indeed be steep, ranging from $3,000 to $7,000 for software and upward of $50,000 per enterprise-class appliance, plus maintenance and user licenses. But NAC is getting a bad rap in terms of complexity. While selecting a vendor and architecture, setting endpoint management policies, tinkering with enforcement points, and getting endpoints initially compliant are undeniably time consuming, once the system is up and running, ongoing care and feeding are minimal, especially when considering the benefits.

One lesson learned: Deployers know firsthand the pain of trying to integrate disparate systems, so attention must be paid to whether NAC products work together and with your infrastructure.

We’ll admit that NAC is not a moneymaker, so we aren’t surprised that many IT teams are choosing to direct limited resources elsewhere. But when we asked respondents who had taken the plunge to name the top driver, network security compliance came in at 56%, followed by a related goal, enforcing access to network resources, at 55%. If yours is one of the organizations endlessly chasing a moving regulatory target, NAC can buy you some breathing room. Fifty-four percent of respondents told us their NAC systems are critical for protecting access to data centers, where intellectual property and personal data assets likely reside. As the trend toward virtualization and centralization of storage and other departmental services accelerates, protecting the data center will only become more important.