Digital Equipment Corp security software and Unix back-up and storage house Raxco Inc, Rockville, Maryland, recently opened a new wholly-owned subsidiary devoted to DEC and Unix security management products. Raxco senior vice-president of operations Pete Privateer is to run Axent Technologies, with Tom McDonough as vice president of sales. The new company will start life with up to 120 employees drawn from its parent’s ranks and outside. Raxco gained its security products from the acquisition of Clyde DEC around three years ago and its Unix storage technology from Reading, Berkshire-based Unitech Plc. Raxco says it did turnover of around $10m on security products last year and believes the market will grow at between 30% and 40% a year. Its idea is to bring the type of robust infrastructures, such as security, normally associated with mainframe environments, to Unix, and particularly commercial client-server architectures.
Unix security
According to its way of thinking, Unix security should encompass much more than Distributed Computing Environment Kerberos and authentification; it is also about the US government’s Orange Book and IBM Corp’s criteria for trusted systems, for instance. Its list runs to six requirements: an enforceable and manageable security policy; user administration and access control through enforced password policies and formats; It is nice to know what happened, or intrusion detection monitoring, which it says is non-existent in most of today’s client-server arrangements; identification and authentication, encryption and remote log-in; back-up to different locations using standard formats and encryption; and data availability via increased automatic back-up devices, including the migrating of critical files off-line to users and optical storage. Accordingly, Axent says that it will address each of these with its first offering, OmniGuard, a suite of six products currently all in beta test and due to ship next month. They are positioned as a subset of an overall systems management framework. OmniGuard includes an Enterprise Security Manager as its foundation. The Enterprise Security Manager is effectively the next release of Raxco’s existing security tool kit and examines all of a system’s current security management and enforces common security policy across clients and the server. It will not, for example, enable users to override password changes, as is possible, it says, in current NetWare implementations. The second component is Enterprise Access Control, a Unix add-on for file and program access and user administration that does not modify the underlying kernel. This was acquired from an unnamed third party, and has been enhanced and repackaged. Intruder Alert is a NetWare and Unix conversion of its existing VAX mechanism. Single Sign-On is an authentication procedure that can provide single log-on access to multiple sites that can be integrated with Kerberos and Distributed Computing Environment. It acquired Enterprise Backup Manager, a back-up unit that is now a cross-system product, from Systems Center Inc 18 months ago. Autostor for Unix is a hierarchical storage manager with integrated back-up and security management, core technology for which came from Lachman Associates Inc. Axent will sell a manager and an agent for each module. The managers run on OpenVMS, OSF/1, Unix and NetWare under Windows or Motif. Windows NT and MVS support is planned. A single module for Unix, or NT, is $2,000. Unix agents are from $400, VAX agents are more and NetWare and personal computer agents less. Axent counts the Open Software Foundation as a customer and says it will support, but will not supply Distributed Computing Environment. OmniGuard works with OpenView, NetView, Tivoli and other management environments. Raxco will also continue to market the Unix security tool kit separately. Axent will do its own research and development at Raxco headquarters plus its facilities in Orem, Utah; Reston, Virginia; Lexington, Massachusetts; Raxco/UIS Leatherhead, in Surrey and at other sites across Europe. It is
seeking European distributors and OEM customers.
