Upgraded SiteMinder toughens security
Netegrity releases a new version of SiteMinder software that offers beefed-up security for intranets and extranets.
"Version 2.0 is targeted to the people who build and architect intranet and extranet Web sites," said Jim Rosen, Netegrity's vice president of marketing, mentioning sites for customer service, sales-force reporting, and business-partner information.
"Companies that are trying to do this today are doing this with great pain," he added.
SiteMinder 2.0 offers fine-grain access control so that sensitive information can be seen only by authorized users, based on security privileges. For unauthorized users, it can hide parts of a single Web page.
The software provides all user, session, and access control services for secure Web sites, following a policy-based approach to managing security privileges according to users, not files or devices. Its goal: to reduce development time and costs in building secure applications. Netegrity claims that SiteMinder 2.0 can save 30 to 40 percent of development costs for secure sites.
"We can provide a single point of authentication for communications servers, firewalls, and Web servers," said Rosen, any devices that support the Radius protocol. To date, those include firewalls from Check Point, Raptor, Cisco's PIX, and Microsoft's proxy server.
Early users include The Boston Globe newspaper, software firm Parametric Technology, and Web site developer US Web Utopia.
SiteMinder 2.0 comes in two parts. Pricing for the SiteMinder Server starts at $3,995 for 200 users; the SiteMinder Web Agent is $595 per Web server. Maintenance contracts are available at an additional cost.