HP became a major player in the IAM market with its 2003 acquisition of Baltimore Technologies' Select Access identity-management product. Select Access won our Editor's Choice award in this review, with Novell a close second. Select Access offers a competitive feature set and a management interface second to none. With most products, we spent days trying to configure and implement tasks that with Select Access were quick and easy.
Although we found Novell's package comprehensive and powerful, it requires multiple Novell products and would be a big step for a non-Novell shop; several admins would be needed to maintain the Novell IAM installation. RSA's ClearTrust, on the other hand, is easy to use and would work well for organizations with staff programmers who like to tinker. However, though ClearTrust has most of the core features of an enterprise IAM suite, it lacks out-of-the-box support for multiple identity stores, something organizations should demand--especially since ClearTrust is among the more expensive products.
We were not impressed with Entegrity's AssureAccess. It doesn't support the latest OSs or Web servers, and it lacks many of the features found in rival products, notably money-saving user self-service features, such as password resets. To see what the other IAM products offer in self-service functionality, see "IAM Suite Features,".
Select Access is simple to manage and supports all the IAM features we sought. We used the Select Access setup tool to install agent plug-ins on all the Web servers we wanted to protect. Unlike other products tested, Select Access doesn't offer its own reverse-proxy server; however, it does support third-party products. Select Access uses an administrative service to set up and store policies, and a validator service to authenticate administrators and users. Although it's common to set up a single administrative service, we could set up multiple validators to provide redundancy in case the primary server failed.
We administered Select Access through its Policy Builder, a Java GUI that launched in a Web browser when we logged on to the administrative site. This interface is the best of those we looked at. Its use of a visual policy matrix to map relationships between organized trees of users and resources is simple and intuitive.
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