* Restricting users to specific sets of resources
One little secret about SSL remote access gear is that they’re not always so easy to set up.
When the equipment came out a few years ago, they were touted for their ease of use, which is true from a certain point of view. If you were an end user, you just used your browser to access the resources you wanted. If you were an administrator, you didn’t have to worry about distributing and maintaining client software for remote machines.
SSL equipment also use the standard SSL ports to get through firewalls, and since these ports are generally left open, the SSL remote access gear require no special firewall reconfiguration.
But one of the things this type of gear can offer is restricting users to very specific sets of resources. The salesforce gets access to a bundle of product data, pricing lists, CRM software and billing applications. The product marketing team gets access to product data and pricing but not CRM and billing. The accounting department gets access to price lists and billing but not CRM and product data.
The point is there are lots of subsets of resources that can be carved out for particular classes of users, and for a long time these subsets had to be done manually, what one analyst calls “a giant access-control-list nightmare.”
Just this week, Aventail is announcing software tools to make this type of sorting simpler. Groups of users can be defined. Sets of resources can be defined and access to one or more sets can be assigned to one or more groups. Defining these groups and resource sets and manipulating them as groups and sets rather than their component parts makes assigning access rights a lot easier. It also reduces the chances for error that generally increase as the amount of data that gets input grows.
So while vendors didn’t talk about it much when there was no remedy for the problem, it is being talked more about now. That’s a sign of progress.
