E-DMZ PAR shoots to manage privileged accounts en masse

e-DMZ's Password Auto Repository (PAR) is delivered as a hardware appliance with all the services necessary for it to act as a privileged account password manager. All privileged account passwords are issued based on administratively designed rules. The passwords may be deemed valid for an indefinite life, for finite periods of time or for single purpose activities such as installations, upgrades or configuration changes.

Most all modern operating systems have passwords that can have a short-term life with quick expiration, but what separates PAR from this basic functionality is its ability to keep track of up to 20,000 (PAR 'Standard Edition') or 250K or more with the PAR Enterprise Edition. Arguably, a large organization with more than 1,000 servers and you have multiple administrators that handle different aspects of these servers, that capacity is not out of reach.

PAR replaces stored paper lists and spreadsheets of privileged account passwords, and automates the process of asking for one, getting one, and what happens to the password after issuance.

e-DMZ offers an optional product called e-GuardPost that will record sessions when the password is in use for auditing purposes, in a similar fashion as Quest Privilege Manager does. In our tests, we found that it collects a voluminous amount of information on log sessions, especially when things such as service packs are installed.

Click to see: Initial setup for e-DMZ PAR can be aided by importing users from a simple text file.

Overall, the e-DMZ PAR password storage and issuance system was less evolved than its genetic rival, PowerKeeper. While many features, such as password issuance, can be sophisticated, other features like systems grouping and related user object definition and functions were more difficult to set up and use.

There is no standard administrative 'client' portion of PAR. This 'agentless operation' puts the focus on the appliance as the single source for privileged password access, regardless of client type, and regardless of target platform password to be used. The PAR product was provided on an 'OEM' appliance that runs Windows 2003 'hardened' Server operating system. Once configured, there is no console access; this is similar to PowerKeeper's use. Backups and restores are easy to understand and complete, and a 'cold spare can be kept' as well as a primary/secondary 'mirrored' device that was tested and not difficult to configure and use.