AppSense Fights for Virtualization User Rights
With 5,000 customers such as JPMorgan, Chase, Wachovia and ESPN around the world, AppSense definitely has a competitive leg up on the ever-growing number of vendors seeking to find a lucrative niche in the virtualization market they can call their own. AppSense hangs its hat on the concept of "user virtualization," which is designed to streamline multi-platform desktop deployments. It seeks to do this by eliminating expensive user management tools, enabling single-image application delivery and ensuring that users have the same experience at any desktop. All good stuff.
Conscious of the need to provide tight security without strangling user access rights, AppSense has unveiled what VP of marketing Peter Rawlinson calls a new functionality similar to that of a virtual user infrastructure. "It's not a product you install, it's almost a platform for the user," Rawlinson says. More specifically, it's all about user rights management capabilities that create stronger security, reduce opportunities for desktop corruption, slash desktop management costs, and enhance desktop stability.
There are four primary concepts at the heart of user rights benefits. The first is elevating user privileges for running applications by specifying applications to run with administrative privileges. This capability makes it possible to remove users from the local administrators group, and in so doing "remove the risk of all applications executing under the administrative user context."
The second concept is organizing user rights for running control panel applets by allowing a standard user to make the required changes and complete their job tasks without running as a local administrator. AppSense says "This is extremely useful when users need to change printer, wireless network, time and date settings, etc."
The third concept behind user rights management is prioritizing user rights to restrict application rights by enabling system administrators to set up and enforce policy for specific applications "so that the user runs as an administrator but other applications are forced to run as a standard user, ensuring security is not compromised."
The fourth concept is managing access to system settings by permitting system administrators to prevent admin level users from "changing configuration settings that can expose enterprises to new security concerns such as security or firewall settings."
User rights management comes as part of AppSense Application Manager 8.1.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 09/20/2010 at 12:48 PM