AlterPoint this week announced it had upgraded its flagship network change and configuration management software to enable role-based management, device lifecycle tracking and user action auditing.
The company, which boasts nearly 120 customers, says it added features to DeviceAuthority 4.0 specific to managing compliance in this release. For instance, network managers can now customize user permission and roles-based access to devices in an effort to increase control and decrease errors. Also AlterPoint enabled third-party systems such as Microsoft Operations Manager to incorporate DeviceAuthority's activity logging into their infrastructure, which the company says will increase compliance efforts. And AlterPoint added integration with TACACS+, RADIUS and CiscoSecure ACS, which the company says enables customers to use the software to see granular devices information from a secure environment.
"We did a lot of work around integration with this release because we realize compliance is a major priority for our customers," says David Williams, vice president of marketing at AlterPoint. "We can collect and manipulate configuration data very well and now we can integrate that into other products."
AlterPoint's DeviceAuthority Suite includes a server, a set of adapters and an Open Database Connectivity-compliant database. It has two application components, the Audit Module for inventory reporting and the Update Module, which automates mass configuration changes across any range of devices. The suite supports more than 1,000 network devices from 25 manufacturers and audits in real time any change made to any of those devices.
Network administrators install the software on a server and kick off a device discovery process, which will report back hardware and software configuration data from every device to be managed. Network administrators can then set policies and rules the software can be set to automatically enforce based on device configurations and network changes that could impact the configurations.
DeviceAuthority 4.0 is available now. Pricing starts at about $20,000, and the company says an average installation costs about $150,000 based on the number of devices managed.