Monday, December 19, 2011

Quest Acquires BitKoo and Dives Into Authorization

Back in the mid-90’s Netscape’s release of their LDAP directory product heralded the beginning of many companies starting to centralize identity information and authentication. Over the last few years many companies have started to struggle with all of the applications they have – especially web-based apps – and how they could possibly externalize their authorization processes. There’s been an OASIS standard defined for authorization called XACML and a number of ISVs have built software that leverages XACML.

Quest has chosen to move forward with BitKoo as our “big bet” in the authorization market. We feel that BitKoo provides the best fit for our customers with their .NET-based architecture, their plugins for SharePoint and their overall capabilities and architecture. And, with all of our privileged account and other identity management products we have a natural fit for BitKoo's software.

I’m looking forward to working with the BitKoo team!

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Quest Releases Privileged Account Management Plugins for Sudo

Most every company out there that uses Unix or Linux is also using Sudo to manage delegation of root privileges. The only alternative for additional capabilities like centralized policy management or keystroke logging was an expensive privileged account management product - until today with the release of our plugins for Sudo.

Quest's Privilege Manager for Sudo plugins provide a central policy server that eliminates the need for box-by-box management of sudoers files, and offers visibility and relevant reports on Sudo policy and use, including access control; separation of duties; and policy tracking, versioning, and change history. Privilege Manager for Sudo enables users to continue to use Sudo as the enterprise-wide primary privileged account management solution for Unix/Linux systems. This results in no end user or administrator retraining requirements, fewer help desk calls and a faster time-to-value.

Joab Jackson at ComputerWorld interviewed me for an article he wrote on this which you can find here. The software is available now and Quest has included 10 licenses at no-cost if you want to try it out at your organization!