In last week's "Best Products" issue of Network World, I chose Elemental Security's Elemental Compliance system as a "Category Breaker." That is, in the words of editor Beth Schultz, "...products [that] raise the bar with novel ways to solve today's enterprise challenges." Picking Elemental was easy since I used the dreaded phrase "new paradigm" when I first told you about the system last May.

We try to keep the choices of Category Breakers secret until the magazine is published so I avoided talking to the folks at Elemental Security while I prepared the write-up of their product. Which meant that, when I did finally agree to talk to them on the day the "Best Products" issue made the newsstands, what they wanted to talk about was a new release of the product (Version 2.0), now called Elemental Security Platform (ESP), which hit the shelves this week. If Version 1.1 was a Category Breaker, then Version 2 could be called the Category Definer.

Version 2 doesn't introduce any ground-breaking new features it simply expands on those already in the product - better scalability, broader platform coverage, finer grained role definitions, flexible scheduling, better integration with 3rd-party products and much more. Nothing spectacular, just bigger, better, stronger, faster! The high points:

* Scale: Supports up to 10,000 agents.

* New platforms: Solaris (server), AIX, HP-UX, Mac OSX (Agent).

* Managing Policies:
- Fine grained admin roles (read/write permissions).
- LDAP & RADIUS Elemental user authorization.
- Flexible policy scheduling (start / stop time, days of week).
- Rule exceptions.

* Policy Content:
- Best practices: CIS Benchmarks.
- Regulatory: HIPAA, PCI.
- Data protection (disable local storage and printers).
- Anti-Virus (Trend Micro), Anti-Spyware (CA, McAfee, Webroot, Lavasoft).
- Increased rules count (2,000-plus), additional enforcement (300-plus rules).

* Reporting:
- Increase to 100-plus.
- Fine grained scheduling, configurable over time reporting periods.
- Scheduled e-mail delivery.
- New report types (inventory / remediation / trending and change).

* Cisco NAC - Phase I integration complete.

Check what we said about Elemental's Version 1.1 last May, then head over to Elemental's Web site to read more about Version 2. Policy-based computing is something you should have been practicing all along on your Windows network. Elemental makes it easy to extend that paradigm to all the platforms you manage.