OK, your Web portal strategy has finally caught fire with customers, distributors and suppliers. But this gets unwieldy in a complex, ever-changing portal where thousands of users must have specific access to only certain applications controlled by different businesses. Authorization Enforcer Netegrity centralizes all the data about who can access what on a rules engine, or policy server, that runs on a Windows NT or Sun Solaris server. The server contains policies that define, based on users' roles, what applications and data they can access and what actions they can perform.
Agents query the policy server.
The agents intercept user requests to determine if the resources to which they seek access are protected. If a resource is protected, the agent asks the policy server to determine what level of authentication is required for that resource, and then which resources, such as applications, files or individual Web pages, the user may access. Md. Fisher uses Netegrity's SiteMinder to manage access to the extranets he runs for corporate customers. He says fine-tuned authentication is important because a company might require only a password from a user entering from an internal corporate network but require a token or digital certificate of that same person coming in over the public Internet. That is a very important aspect of our service, and SiteMinder enables that .