Gartner on UNIX Security and the New sudo

This is the title of Mark Diodati’s (Gartner/Burton) latest blog post on Unix security and sudo. I wanted to highlight a few things from his concluding paragraph:

It’s a smart move for Quest, and it is good for enterprises that leverage sudo. It opens up sales opportunities for Quest and other UNIX security vendors (e.g., Novell, CA, Centrifly, Cyber-Ark, BeyondTrust [previously Symark], and Fox Technologies) to sell into sudo-centric environments. Quest obviously gets “first mover” advantage. Enterprises will acquire practical centralized policy management without changing the user’s experience. When the time is right, the enterprise can leverage the UNIX security product for its other capabilities.

1. “Enterprises will acquire practical centralized policy management without changing the user’s experience” – This is really important. Sudo 1.8 is completely backwards compatible with previous versions of sudo. Preserving the user’s experience was job #1.
2. Like I said in my last post, I wonder how quickly “other” UNIX security vendors will jump on board the sudo 1.8 plugin architecture. That would certainly validate our efforts wouldn’t it? (And our leadership and vision if I may be so bold to say that)
3. “It’s a smart move for Quest”. Yes, we agree. Let’s not forget that it’s also a smart move for UNIX/Linux customers to begin looking, and we hope eventually using, the sudo 1.8 plugin architecture.

These architecture changes in sudo 1.8 really set up sudo “for the task for large scale UNIX security deployments”.

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