Stories by: Tom Henderson and Rand Dvorak

Privileged IT staffers literally holds the keys to the castle. Access to those keys that open the doors to critical operating system and application resources must be carefully managed and legally audited. Enter the class of products referred to as privilege account management wares.

e-DMZ's Password Auto Repository (PAR) is delivered as a hardware appliance with all the services necessary for it to act as a privileged account password manager. All privileged account passwords are issued based on administratively designed rules. The passwords may be deemed valid for an indefinite life, for finite periods of time or for single purpose activities such as installations, upgrades or configuration changes.

Cyber-Ark's product was sent to us in pre-configured VMware-format virtual machines. While it's Cyber-Ark's policy to install 100 per cent of its products, we requested this optional product delivery mode that allowed us to install the product ourselves.

Quest Privilege Manager for Unix (QPM) currently only works with Unix derivatives. No Windows allowed.

Symark, late in 2006, broke code development ranks with OEM partner eDMZ Security. The PowerKeeper 2.0 running on HP hardware we tested represents some slight changes in terms of flexibility, operating system and application support between the two offerings. The company plans to release PowerKeeper 3.0 this summer, but that revised code was not ready for us to test.