With the launch of Ottawa-based Texar Corp.’s SecureRealms suite for securing information over the Web, peer-to-peer environments and throughout the enterprise, the company has entered a market that is quickly growing crowded, according to one analyst.
Texar SecureRealms is at its simplest level a Java-based tool that lets network managers set policies to control file sharing throughout a company’s resources. According to Eugen Bacic, founder and chief technology officer of Texar, the product can be used on any platform.
“It’s not tied to the Web or to the enterprise or legacy or applications for peer-to-peer. It transcends all of them so that you can have a true unified set of policies that are applicable consistently across all of the different platforms,” he said. Resources that users have access to are protected at the information level by SecureRealms, he said.
Bacic offered this example: There are a group of users and a group of resources and data in a realm that the users want to use. In that realm are all the resources the users need to do their job, and the resources are shared internally and externally. The network manager uses SecureRealms to define what resources are included in the realm, which users have access, what users can and cannot do with the system and when the realm is active and inactive.
“The notion of a realm is really those users and that information that you want to protect and the policies that are applied to those resources so they’re protected accordingly,” Bacic said.
According to Pete Lindstrom, a senior security analyst with Hurwitz Group Inc. of Framingham, Mass., Texar has chosen an area that is seeing a lot of activity from many different players. He said the company has one thing going for it: While a lot of the players in the market are really focused on the Web environment, he said that is not true of Texar and a few others.
“They’re really trying to open the door to protecting more environments in as easy a way as possible,” he said.
When a company first implements SecureRealms, the network manager will be expected to define the policies. SecureRealms comes with policies that can be used out of the box, but more detailed and complex policies will need to be programmed. For simple custom policies, there is a graphical builder program Bacic likens to a Lego set, because he said it is easy to snap the various aspects of the policy together and implement it. For the more complicated policies, however, a better-than-average knowledge of networks and policy management is required. For companies without the in-house expertise to create custom policies, Texar can offer the services of its team.
Functionally, SecureRealms isn’t much different from its competitors, Lindstrom said, adding that the most important part of SecureRealms is its peer-to-peer connectivity capabilities.
“There’s no one [else] in this space talking [about] peer-to-peer,” Lindstrom said.
Texar SecureRealms is available now and is priced at $75 per MHz, per server. The company is on the Web at www.texar.com.