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.
On the user tree, we easily added our Active Directory and Sun One Directory. Within each directory, we viewed users, groups and roles. Creating a new role is as simple as right-clicking on the directory and picking the user attributes that define that role: For example, we set up a role so that users who had booked sales greater than $100,000 would have access to a resource. We could create custom rules by dragging and dropping appropriate icons onto a chart and then configuring their values. These icons represent common restrictions, such as network address, time of day, IP address, port, attributes and encryption level. Lastly, self-service was a snap to set up--we simply specified which attributes users should be allowed to edit.
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