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Product Roundup: Network Security Takes Center Stage

As everyone knows by now, securing a network requires a multilayered, multifaceted approach. A spate of announcements this week from a variety of security vendors big and small shows just how intricate the security problem can be.

VARs who work in the security space are finding that many of their clients have similar issues, regardless of their vertical sector, so combining a range of solutions is almost always the best approach.

"All companies have the same common problems when it comes to security, and the large corporations can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars on their security architectures," says Greg Hanchin, a principal at DirSec, a security integrator with offices in Denver, Oklahoma City, Omaha and Las Vegas.

Sun Microsystems announced that it is shipping Sun Java System Identity Auditor, a solution that helps improve audit and compliance performance. It enables customers to create a secure identity audit trail and present a unified view of an individual's identity and system-access activities. The solution delivers proactive, automated and sustainable visibility into identity controls across critical enterprise applications and the entire identity-management infrastructure. Sun has not yet released pricing information.

"Companies are spending substantial sums of money to hire and manage external consultants to perform auditing and compliance tasks for identity management activities," says Roberta J. Witty, research vice president at Gartner. "To answer the question of, 'Who has access to what?' and prove it, companies need a secure, automated analysis and reporting solution that is cost-effective and comprehensive in its capabilities, including the scope of supported platforms and applications as well as role-conflict analysis."

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