NetIQ launches advanced access and authentication solutions

NetIQ has launched NetIQ Access Manager 4.1 and NetIQ Advanced Authentication Framework 5.1, a product combination that offers organisations a powerful risk-based authentication solution. The technologies adaptively tailor the appropriate level of identity verification for each situation to keep access simple for users - without compromising security.

"Organisations continue to face challenges with providing consistent, convenient and secure access from different devices to enterprise, third-party applications and cloud-based services," noted Gregg Kriezman, vice president, Research at Gartner. "Organisations that proceed with disjointed Identity and Access Management and Enterprise Mobility Management may delay or lose opportunities to provide users with consistent convenient access while adequately protecting the enterprise against threats that increasingly overcome traditional access controls."

In today’s global and distributed work environment employees expect to have immediate and easy access to all data and business services required to do their job and remain productive, regardless of location and device. At the same time, traditional credentials (username and password) have proven to be vulnerable. For enterprises to succeed at reducing risk, better controls are required – and must be applied appropriately – without compromising a frictionless end-user experience.

NetIQ Access Manager 4.1 provides the next level of access control by enabling organisations to take a risk-based approach to protecting their environment from unauthorised access. By adapting an appropriate level of authentication based on situational risk, organisations are able to tailor the user’s authentication experience to the proper strength. NetIQ Access Manager allows the administrator to define context-based policies, such as the user’s location, device and time of access to assess the risk of the desired request, resulting in a dynamic approach to balancing simplicity and security.

For organisations that need the broadest selection of authentication methods, NetIQ Advanced Authentication Framework provides both flexibility and a central point of administration for virtually all advanced authentication needs. And with version 5.1, NetIQ Advanced Authentication Framework is offered as a soft appliance, making it quick to configure and deploy.

“Today, most users expect to conduct business anytime, at any location, on any device that they may have at hand. This poses new challenges to managing risk,” said Kent Purdy, Solutions Marketing Manager at NetIQ. “Protecting sensitive information from outside threats while keeping access simple for users can be a complex challenge. Access Manager's built-in risk-based authentication enables organizations to tailor the user’s authentication experience to match the situation, without adding complexity to their infrastructure or budgeting for expensive deployments.“

Key features of NetIQ Advanced Authentication Framework and Access Manager:

Risk-based authentication for increased security and simplified access for users.
Authentication framework that enables organisations to centralise their current authentication needs, and provides flexibility to adopt new authentication types that may be available in the future.
Simplified Access Manager migration from test to production environments for improved reliability and ease of management.
Soft appliance form factor for simplified configuration and deployment.