One of the fundamental issues faced by IT managers today is the lack of a basic, consistent framework needed to protect intellectual property, customer data, and sensitive information.
Networks today are typically based on a “topology aware” architecture utilizing methodologies developed more than twenty five years ago, leaving IT resources struggling to meet the necessary standards required to address today’s dynamic TCP/IP based environments.
While many organizations have spent considerable funds for perimeter security to keep unwanted intruders out, the internal network communities have tended to be – by default - implicitly trusted. Therefore, the requirement to implement internal, network level access controls has been seen as an unnecessary expense. As a consequence, internal access controls within applications and software based security solutions have been the last line of defense against data compromise. This has left the soft underbelly of the network exposed to attack and has, for many organizations, proven to be an erroneous data defense strategy.
Using ID-Enforce, network level user and group separation provides a way to virtually segment users, groups and network resources from each other. Identity aware network solutions can give organizations the ability to bridge-the-gap between application level and network level access controls by controlling access at the lower layers within the network - without the need for complicated firewall and router rule updates. Therefore, identity provides a more consistent, finer grain policy control of resource access and enforcement than existing application level or topology based security controls.