NetIQ product should help IT managers gain greater control over employee access rights

NetIQ will today introduce a tool to give IT chiefs greater control over access rights granted to staff in IT departments. The product aims to help large organisations better manage changes to critical server infrastructure.

Change Administrator, available immediately, allows IT staff to be given the rights to perform specific tasks for a limited period of time only, instead of having blanket administrator rights.

"At the end of the day, all admins have rights to do anything," said NetIQ director of product management Jim McGrath. "This 'keys to the kingdom' approach is no longer acceptable in financial firms, healthcare organisations, and others. They need more granular control over who can change what," he added.

Change Administrator is based on Microsoft's Terminal Services technology, and gives each admin worker a console with only the functionality they need to do their allotted tasks.

Delegation is controlled by an IT director or other senior manager, and Change Administrator creates an Entitlement Report that audits who has had access to what server and what actions they were able to perform.

Restricting the access privileges of IT staff might prevent them from carrying out their job effectively. Should this occur, workers can temporarily escalate themselves to full admin rights through an Emergency Access function. However, this alerts a supervisor and logs every action the worker then performs, McGrath said.

Version 1 of Change Administrator supports Windows systems and Active Directory, but NetIQ is planning a second version that will extend support to Unix and Linux servers. Change Administrator costs $2,000 per managed server.