Utimaco SafeGuard Enterprise 5.3

This review was conducted under group test conditions. Click here for the complete Group Test.

Utimaco's SafeGuard Enterprise 5.3 is actually five components that roll into one product suite: Safe-Guard Partner Connect, Manage­ment Center, Device Encryption, Data Exchange and Configura­tion Protection are all integrated components that work together to off er file and folder-based or whole disk encryption.

Installation of the product was easy. We encountered no bumps along the way. The management console and server was installed on our Windows 2003 test server and required MS SQL, IIS and the .NET framework to be installed as well.

Policies and cli­ent packages can all be created from the Management Center, but both the installation and con­figuration files need to be pushed using a third-party product.

Overall, we liked the look and feel of the tool, and it performed very well in our testing. Like all of our products, we tested within both virtual and physical server environments -- using Windows XP SP2 for our client testing.

On the client components, the software takes such tight control that you are no longer able to use Remote Desktop on Windows hosts in order to manage them.

However, use of VNC or other remote management products works just fine. This was an inter­esting finding, as Utimaco boasts tight integration with Microsoft products and even offers support for Vista BitLocker.

SafeGuard Enterprise contains all the bells and whistles that we would expect to see - pre-boot authentication, emergency access and strong authentication support. The features offer the strictest of control over devices, drives, files and even ports.

Documentation for all compo­nents of SafeGuard Enterprise is available in PDF format and is useful and very informative. There are video tutorials offered to help first-time administrators walk through typical installation and configuration tasks.

The product comes with free basic support, which is off ered on an eight hours a day/five days a week basis. This includes phone and web portal support. An optional 24/7 support package is available as well. The support site contains a customer portal and a knowledge base.

Pricing for the tool is listed at US$75 per seat for 1,000 seats.