Access Control

摘要

This year our biggest product category was access control. This seems right because as the enterprise morphs into a ubiquitous environment -with few if any borders - there needs to be a way to control who can access it and who cannot. With such challenges as cloud computing and SaaS, that is a bigger job than it may appear on the surface. In fact, it is a bigger job than last year. For 2008 we looked at five familiar categories and one new one. The new one, access management, was a bit of a surprise because it addresses directly - and, I think, for the first time - the disappearance of the perimeter. It was a surprise because it is obvious and yet nobody so far has come right out and said, "This is what our product does: It separates the user from the data." That, it turns out, is the key to ignoring the perimeter. But I am getting ahead of myself. That is not the only access control story this year.