Start-up targets network access

Apere plans to block unauthorized attempts to gain access to resources.

Start-up Apere next week plans to introduce a LAN-based access-control appliance for keeping track of users' network access rights and blocking unauthorized attempts to gain access to resources.

Apere's Identity Managed Access Gateway (IMAG) appliance will reside next to any Layer 3 Ethernet switch to inspect IP-based traffic to determine whether a user has permission to access the resources behind the switch. The IMAG appliance aggregates this user identity-management information through software-based collectors that can poll a variety of databases and applications, including those from Siebel and Oracle. A larger collection library is under development.

With the IMAG appliance, Apere is competing most directly with Mirage Networks, another start-up specializing in access control, according to Mounil Patel, research director in information security at Aberdeen Group.

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Start-up Apere next week plans to introduce a LAN-based access-control appliance for keeping track of users' network access rights and blocking unauthorized attempts to gain access to resources.

Apere's Identity Managed Access Gateway (IMAG) appliance will reside next to any Layer 3 Ethernet switch to inspect IP-based traffic to determine whether a user has permission to access the resources behind the switch. The IMAG appliance aggregates this user identity-management information through software-based collectors that can poll a variety of databases and applications, including those from Siebel and Oracle. A larger collection library is under development.

With the IMAG appliance, Apere is competing most directly with Mirage Networks, another start-up specializing in access control, according to Mounil Patel, research director in information security at Aberdeen Group.

"IMAG has the ability to allow or disallow access to resources based on who the person is, not just the IP address," Patel says. "They are binding identity with access information."

"When a login happens with a user, we know what rights he's got," says Ram Jayam, Apere founder and CEO. "If our appliance says the user doesn't have an account, we deny that user access rights."

According to Apere, the IMAG appliance inspects traffic at speeds as high as 600Mbps to determine whether users are authorized. Apere expects IMAG to be most widely used in enterprises with 500 to 10,000 users.

With the consolidation of user identity in one place, IMAG can establish a "roving set of policies" for user permissions, Aberdeen Group's Patel says. "For instance, it can establish if a user is coming in by VPN; that's fine, but if a user is trying to log in through an outsourcing center in another country, that might not be allowed."

Apere IMAG starts at $15,000.

Read more about security in Network World's Security section.