It's been a while!

It's been some time since my last post, mainly due to the fact it's been a very busy few months on the product development and strategy side of things with a fair amount of travel thrown in for good measure.

The good news is that we're making serious headway with both Defender and QPM from and engineering standpoint and we’ll have even more fantastic new features available for both products later this year. Watch this space! And whilst I’m on the good news, a big thanks to everyone involved for making Defender a knock-out product for us last year! We grew our defender business substantially and really had a fantastic year all round!

From the travel side of things I've been all over the place visiting customers and attending road shows, the most to date being the RSA Security conference in San Francisco. I have to be honest and say I have mixed feelings about the RSA conference because I think the quality of leads is arguable. That said, I did have chance to meet up with a few of our partners which has in turn has resulted in some very beneficial planning ideas for 2010.

The next conference I'll be attending (if the planes in Europe are flying that is) will be the Burton Group Catalyst Conference in Prague next week. I'm looking forward to this conference as a) I like the Burton guys, and b) I get the chance to sit in on a few of the sessions as opposed to presenting them for a change, and there appear to be some good ones on the agenda.

Following on from Prague, I'll be off to Infosec Europe the following week in London. Again, I'm looking forward to this as we have some exciting new stuff to demo at the show. This year we'll be on both the ScriptLogic stand as well as the GrIDsure stand so if you're attending Infosec this year, make sure you stop by and see what we've been up to.

Also don't forget that if you've not yet tried our Defender TFA solution, do so today FOR FREE: http://www.quest.com/landing/?id=1331

Let’s hope the next few months have been as profitable as the last and hope to see you at one of your future events!

Defender & ARS working together

One of the things Defender does best is that it provides an easy to manage two factor authentication solution.

We've now gone one step further to increase this ease of use by extending Defender functionality within Quest Active Roles Server.

QARS provides you with all the additional security functionality you could want when it comes to managing AD and things like delegation, automated provisioning and much, much more.

Now that QARS can provision users' TFA credentials, you have a truly complete security management solution for your AD users.

Have a look at a high-level run through of Defender and ARS working together here: http://www.quest.com/activeroles-server/integration/demo/defender/index.htm

You can also find out more about ARS here: http://www.quest.com/activeroles-server/security.aspx

Password Management for dummies

Password resets are a mundane, time consuming task but one vital to any organization.

Most if not all the companies I visit want to make the users more self sufficient so they can reduce the burden on the helpdesk and free them up to do other things.

One of the biggest HD overheads (time and hence cost)? PW resets!

So what are your choices? As I see it it can be narrowed to the following:

1. Continue spending loads of money on your own helpdesk
2. Build and application yourself
3. Buy a self service PW reset application from someone like Quest.

They all have their challenges:

1. Costly!
2. More costly!
3. Confusing

Most people agree they want a COTS app as it's often the easiest from an implementation perspective, and you can give the vendors a hard time when something goes wrong so there's and element of 'insurance' included.

That said, if you Google 'password self service' or the like, you'll most probably get a 101 million hits and it's difficult to know where to start.

Keep it simple:

1. Stating the obvious but it must offer good ROI and TCO.
2. It should be a proven technology. Are you willing to be a security guinea pig? Probably not.
3. Where are your users? In AD? If they are, you want a fully AD integrated solution. If they're not, go with whatever scales/is integrated best with your environment.
4. It should be flexible to the extent that you can include as many applications within the PW reset as you deem necessary. Is one secure PW better than 10 insecure PW's? I don't know but it's definitly more convenient for the end user meaning the chances they wrote them down is less. And yes, PW sync is WAY easier than SSO no matter what anyone says so if you're looking to rationalize PW's & ID's, this is a great start!
5. Future proof it. Don't buy proprietary!

Check out www.Quest.com/Password-Manager & www.Quest.com/InSync for more info on how Quest can help you with all the above and loads more.