Antivirus vendor Trend Micro has announced its Network VirusWall Enforcer (NVWE), which it described as a second-generation network-access control (NAC) appliance.

Trend Micro said the NVWE can check that all managed or unmanaged, local or remote devices comply with enterprise security policies before network access is granted.

NVWE product manager Malav Patel said, “We have a two-pronged approach to the network control issue, firstly using our home-grown NVWE NAC appliance and secondly through the support of Cisco’s NAC and Microsoft’s Network Access Protection (NAP). With both these approaches we can solve the overall NAC challenge.”

Trend Micro said the Enforcer scans devices for security software, updates and critical patches. After evaluating the profile of devices it implements security policies automatically, and quarantines non-compliant systems for remediation before allowing network access.

“The device runs on Intel hardware but unlike Cisco’s NAC and Microsoft’s NAP it’s an agentless system,” added Patel.

There are two models, the 1200 and the high-end 2500. IT managers would deploy the system inline with network traffic. The 2500 can protect up to 4,096 concurrent users. It has five Gigabit Ethernet connections for the LAN or WAN.

The turnkey appliances are centrally managed through a built-in web console using the Trend Micro Control Manager. The appliances will be available in mid-April, but pricing has not yet been announced.