Digital ID World announcements: NetPro, NetVision, BioPassword

The foundation for security and enterprise management

It’s Digital ID World week here in San Francisco, and that means lots of announcements from lots of our favorite identity product vendors, consortiums, associations and others. Over the next few issues we’ll cover the most important and/or most interesting of them, so we might just as well jump right in.

Fellow Red Sox fan (that’s why she gets the top spot) and NetPro VP of Corporate Communications Christine McDermott wanted us to know that the company has released AccessManager 2.0 (an actual revision number, I might add), the latest version of its role-based access management solution for Windows. The new release further tightens security and streamlines entitlement auditing processes by detailing who has access to what within the system. Administrators can track and report on everything from access rights to provisioning activities, and - with centralized management of enterprise-wide audit settings – they also gain a new ability for reporting both current and historical data across Windows resources, including Active Directory, files, folders, shares, printers, registry, and services.

Two particularly intriguing new features are:
* Approval-based role membership – this allows users to request membership to specific roles for specific durations through powerful workflow processing.
* Approval-based changes – which supports user-initiated changes for all aspects of delegation and role management, including changes to templates, roles and assignments.

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It’s Digital ID World week here in San Francisco, and that means lots of announcements from lots of our favorite identity product vendors, consortiums, associations and others. Over the next few issues we’ll cover the most important and/or most interesting of them, so we might just as well jump right in.

Fellow Red Sox fan (that’s why she gets the top spot) and NetPro VP of Corporate Communications Christine McDermott wanted us to know that the company has released AccessManager 2.0 (an actual revision number, I might add), the latest version of its role-based access management solution for Windows. The new release further tightens security and streamlines entitlement auditing processes by detailing who has access to what within the system. Administrators can track and report on everything from access rights to provisioning activities, and - with centralized management of enterprise-wide audit settings – they also gain a new ability for reporting both current and historical data across Windows resources, including Active Directory, files, folders, shares, printers, registry, and services.

Two particularly intriguing new features are:
* Approval-based role membership – this allows users to request membership to specific roles for specific durations through powerful workflow processing.
* Approval-based changes – which supports user-initiated changes for all aspects of delegation and role management, including changes to templates, roles and assignments.

Visit the AccessManager Web page for all the details.

The guys from Utah’s NetVision are also in town and are happy to share with one and all the newest release (Version 6.0) of NV Monitor. Among the added features are real-time file system monitoring for Microsoft Windows and a new reporting console for the Identity Audit and Security Platform. Based on the tried and true NetVision global event monitoring engine (which has been continuously refined and improved over the past dozen years), the NetVision platform monitors all adds, deletes, and changes to file and folder access rights as well as access to, and modification of, sensitive files. IT administrators and auditors are able to execute reports and receive alerts detailing who has accessed or modified sensitive data. But, possibly more interesting, NVMonitor’s extensibility allows action to be taken when non-compliant file access events occur. Yes, you can close the barn door before the horses get out. Go here for more information.

And finally (at least for this issue), the BioPassword team was really pleased to be able to announce Version 4.0 of its Enterprise Edition, combining all three methods of authenticating users: a combination of keystroke biometrics (something users are), knowledge-based authentication (something users know) and one-time passwords (something users have). The watchwords the company wants to use are “secure” and “inexpensive”. Keystroke biometrics means you don’t have to install biometric readers on all of your desktops – just use the keyboard that’s already there! No fingerprint readers, no passcode-generating key fobs, no smartcard readers – or anything else. You’ve already got all the hardware you need.

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.