Beyond Trust PowerBroker Express; Authentication Management for SMBs

BeyondTrust, a provider of privileged identity management (PIM) tools for computer networks, is re-aligning its product lineup following a 2009 merger and introducing a new access management tool for virtualized environments, PowerBroker Virtualization. The company is also announcing PowerBroker Express is a scaled-down and cheaper version of its PowerBroker for Servers manager for Unix and Linux environments which was part of the Symark acquisition 2009.

"PowerBroker for Servers, a legacy Symark product, restricts access to mission-critical systems of Global 2000 enterprises, delineating specific access for certain users for specific reasons," said Saurabh Bhatnagar, vice president of product development at BeyondTrust. It also keeps copious log-in records of who accessed what part of the network and when. The logs are protected and not alterable or deletable by administrators so that they can be relied upon as an audit platform and forensic trail, if needed.

PowerBroker Express is being offered for environments that are not mission-critical, offering some, but not all, of the features of PowerBroker for Servers. "A lot of our customers said to us, 'Hey, we love the PowerBroker for Servers products, but we have a lot of our infrastructure that is not very mission-critical. They are asking for a logging and monitoring-centric product," Bhatnagar said. While vague on pricing, he said PowerBroker will be significantly discounted from the main product when it goes on sale sometime in July.

The streamlined PowerBroker Express addresses a key pain point for customers, said Sally Hudson, research director of security products and services at IDC in an e-mail interview. "PowerBroker is essential for compliance, but companies need something less complex and less expensive for their non-critical apps than the standard PIM packages --- most would be overkill in this area," she says.

Also new from BeyondTrust is a privileged-access management tool for virtual environments called PowerBroker Virtualization. It maintains access privileges management on a virtualization hypervisor, primarily industry leading VMware's ESX hypervisor, as well as virtual servers running on that physical server. While the virtualization tool also runs on Sun Solaris and IBM AIX hypervisors, it does not yet support Microsoft's Hyper-V, although it does work in Windows host and guest server OSes.BeyondTrust is also offering a sudo migration tool to ease the implementation of sudo controls in systems. Sudo is a Unix utility that allows temporary privileges to users without access to log onto a network using another user's credentials. However, it is a cumbersome and costly process to set up, log and monitor access sessions, and there are security drawbacks. BeyondTrust's tool automates that process for Unix systems that do not use sudo. The sudo tool is part of the PowerBroker for Servers product, which is then incorporated into BeyondTrusts' PowerBroker Management Console for overall management of access privileges on a network.

When security provider Symark acquired BeyondTrust in 2009, the company adopted the BeyondTrust name because it better identified the business it's in, but is adopting the Symark PowerBroker brand name across its portfolio of password management, Unix and Linux server management, virtualization and directory management tools, according to Bhatnagar.

Unifying the branding puts BeyondTrust on par with some of the biggest names in the industry, Hudson said, "similar to enterprise identity and access management providers like CA, IBM and Oracle." Besides CA, IBM and Oracle, BeyondTrust's competitors also include Cyber-Ark, eDMZ, Lieberman and Quest Software.