* Novell to resell SecureWay's Sanctuary Suite as part of ZENworks
USB storage devices are handy. I’ve got them on my keychain, my wife wears one as a bracelet – I’ve even got a watch that has a USB plug and can hold 512MB of data! They’ve become the de facto replacement for floppy disks when we need to store and carry a small amount of data around. And, it seems, they’re virtually indestructible.
When U.S. forces in Iraq bombed and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi they were able to gather a lot of intelligence because he was carrying a USB drive in his pocket – and it wasn’t harmed in the bombing!
But many IT departments have forgotten how vulnerable their networks were to floppy disk-borne malware – and the safeguards we used to take (such as removing or deactivating floppy drives) can’t really be used with USB ports which are needed for so many different devices. It’s just so easy for users to carry data (and who knows what else) back and forth on these ubiquitous devices.
Novell realizes this, and now it’s doing something about it. And it is going about it in the best way, licensing technology from a proven leader in the field. Novell will resell SecureWave‘s Sanctuary Suite as part of the ZENworks line. This suite, intimately connected to eDirectory, has two major components, Sanctuary Device Control and Sanctuary Application Control.
Sanctuary Device Control extends control of I/O devices’ policies. Users can access only explicitly authorized devices. Sanctuary Device Control manages this by applying an access control list to each device type. To grant access, the administrator needs only to associate eDirectory objects (organizational units, users or user groups) with the devices and/or device classes to which they should have access.
Sanctuary Application Control (a custom edition for NetWare/OES environments) manages application execution by providing organizations with the capability of exercising total control over the execution of all applications on the network. Sanctuary Application Control works on the premise that the use of all executables is denied unless authorized. Unlike a blacklist approach, which can only prevent known malware from executing, a positive model listing all authorized executables affords protection against all unknown executable-based viruses, Trojans, worms, spyware and system monitors and prevents the use of unwanted (illegal or unlicensed) software.
When combined with Novell ZENworks and eDirectory, Sanctuary helps customers to ensure compliance with privacy regulations, enforce and audit application and device usage policies and improve security at the network’s most risk-prone point – the desktop. Sounds like a winner to me. Check the data, watch the Webinar, and view the demo – all available from the Novell product page.
