Juniper today announced the acquisition of cloud-native, network access control (NAC) vendor WiteSand for an undisclosed sum, once again proving it’s not afraid to break out its pocketbook in the race against rivals Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Aruba.

NAC “has been a constant thorn in our side. It’s been identified as a potential gap in [Gartner’s] wired and wireless Magic Quadrant report for not having our own homegrown NAC,” Jeff Aaron, VP of enterprise marketing at Juniper, told SDxCentral.

The networking vendor plans to integrate the technology into its Mist portfolio in a bid to compete against Cisco’s Identity Services Engine and Aruba’s Clearpass NACs. These services identify what devices are allowed to connect to the network and are often paired with technologies like microsegmentation as part of a broader zero-trust architecture.

“NAC is an interesting technology. It’s not like there has never been a market for NAC … But the problem with it is it’s always been hard to deploy,” Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst with ZK Research, told SDxCentral. For a long time “keeping up with NAC was probably harder than not using it. It was a situation where the solution to your problem was more complicated than your original problem.”

However, unlike traditional appliance-based NACs, Juniper claims WiteSand's cloud-native technology will be far easier to deploy and manage, especially once integrated with Mist’s artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) engine.

“NAC is traditionally an on-premises device. It’s very complex to pull in data from multiple systems, to gather insight, and it is very difficult to do any kind of correlation,” Aaron said, adding that enabling that kind of correlation, while simplifying the deployment of a NAC, is what Juniper aims to achieve through the acquisition.

However, Kerravala said he doesn’t believe Juniper’s goal is to steal away existing NAC customers. Instead, he says the acquisition is an ecosystem play to sell an “end-to-end” Juniper Networks' experience.

Historically, other vendors have done a better job of selling their ecosystem as a whole, he added. "To me, this is about trying to gain share in all parts of networking by having a better end-to-end story.”

According to Aaron, it’s a little of both. “There is a market for next-generation NAC, which we’re certainly going to go after, but our big differentiation is our client-to-cloud portfolio,” he said. “It’s an old, outdated, on-premises, complex market ready for disruption.”

Additionally, access control technologies, like NAC, are going to become more important as the number of devices on the network grows, Kerravala said. Enterprises today have to account for employee devices, IoT and health monitoring devices, even cleaning robots, all of which need to connect to the network, he explained.

Since acquiring the wireless and LAN switching vendor in 2019 for $405 million, Juniper has — or plans to — integrate Mist’s AIOps capabilities into nearly every facet of its product stack.

Some of the biggest integrations include Juniper’s campus switching and routing portfolios and the company’s $450 million acquisition of SD-WAN vendor 128 Technology. Juniper completed the integration of the latter earlier this year.