Symark International PowerKeeper

The Symark PowerKeeper is a hardened appliance. It comes with a sealed operating system that provides a secure privileged account access management process to replace the human approach to granting privileged access.

PowerKeeper automatically audits and man­ages access to "systems," and can dynamically rotate the pass­word on all types of privileged accounts, such as pre-defi ned/ shared administrative accounts, application accounts and local administrative accounts.

We had mixed feelings about this product in terms of its ease of use. While the web GUI for the appliance was easy and intuitive to use and manage, the installation, which seemed straightforward on paper, was not as cut and dry in practice. The appliance comes loaded with administrative users built in, and during setup we had to use these accounts to begin the configuration process.

We had a few problems keeping straight which account to use for which task. We would have liked a dif­ferent approach for intial access, such as a setup wizard.

That said, the product is solid in the way of performance. The PowerKeeper appliance uses FIPS 140-2 Level 2 encryption technol­ogy for all data and communica­tions, access control mechanisms, securely stores credentials and passwords, and creates audit trails.

PowerKeeper randomly generates passwords based on user configurable password construction rules. It eliminates hard-coded passwords in applications using certificates and sets of approved program factors. If the application is authorised, PowerKeeper checks out a password to the application and can rotate the password to a new value and can integrate to Symark PowerBroker for root account delegation/carving.

Documentation for Symark PowerKeeper includes an instal­lation guide, user guide and an interface user guide, all in the industry standard PDF format. These are all quite detailed and easy to follow, including many screen shots and examples.

As with the company's Power-Broker, Symark provides 24/7/365 phone and email support at a cost of 20 percent of the license fee for this off ering.

At a price of US$25,000 for 100 systems and unlimited users, this is a solid value for the money. The tool offers high-end granularity and system support paired with a comprehensive feature set.

See original article on SC Magazine US