EnterSpace Security Suite™ for Education and e-Education

Run-time security decisioning including authentication support, coarse-to-fine-grained authorization, and federated attribute retrieval: improve access & security at the SAME time

Educational institutions must continually strike a balance between user access and enterprise security. As more and more organizations improve online learning environments, student self-care and increasingly sophisticated collaborative access portals, the tension between access and security only grows. Information technologists within the educational arena must secure institutional resources and student information while still improving quality of service. Add to this business driver, the fact that most educational applications were never built for Internet-sized user communities. Given these present day realities, a new enterprise tool is needed for next generation access management and authorization. The EnterSpace Security Suite is this tool.

Every Request for a Secured Resource Is Individually Authorized — While many solutions exist within the access management and authorization space for educational institutions, most lack true real-time functionality. Those who need-to-know are identified statically and saved in an access-control-list (ACL) by a human administrator. The result is that the security model is only as current as the ACL, leading to coarse or poorly controlled security models and holes in the enterprise's security posture. As user community size increases and the number of secured resources under management continues to grow, maintenance of ACLs becomes progressively more prohibitive.

Many organizations have responded by “batching” updates to the ACL to minimize the volatility, but unfortunately this means that security decisions are only as accurate as the ACL is current. Traditional ACL driven models are inherently out of date, in that what is being saved is the RESULT of a security policy being applied to user-specific information. Therefore, the ACL is only as current as the moment it was created. The inability of this model to provide security implementations that accurately reflect “right-now” information, has prevented enterprises from sharing with students, employees, partners and vendors all the information they might have a legitimate need-to-know — in effect, it has built walls that limit relationships and productivity. The EnterSpace Security Suite makes a real-time decision for every request to allow fine-grained, context-sensitive access decisions that are based upon CURRENT user information and security policies. It is time to tear down the walls between the enterprise and its users.

For Example — Security needs in education are many and varied: they can range from managing which students are granted viewing access to course materials, to managing which instructors are allowed to enter grades, to controlling physical access to facilities. The interesting thing about educational institutions, and their security needs, is that the list of items to be managed is relatively static over time — and so are the guidelines which define who should be able to access them. What changes is the cast of players; and it experiences a complete redefinition every few months. A recent conversation with an administrator for a large university revealed that every Autumn approximately 80,000 students appeared on campus to begin the term. His staff then spent 2-3 weeks creating identities and granting the permissions needed to enable the students to operate within the environment. Then four months later, they went into the systems to delete all the permissions and start over again for the Spring term.

With the EnterSpace Security Suite, the picture is very different. The tool allows you to consume attributes from the student database, the enrollment database, and the faculty/staff database, etc. Once the rules are captured for each managed resource (a process distributable to the owners of the resources themselves), the process of setting up permissions for the students becomes completely automatic. In fact, there are NO permissions whatsoever — the decision to grant or withhold access is made at the moment access is requested. This enables access controls to be based upon real-time data items. For example, access to the course materials for Psych. 101 could be controlled by a rule granting access to all current students who are enrolled in Psych. 101, but they must also be in good financial standing with the university. The moment that a delinquent financial standing is reflected to the system of record (here the enrollment database), the student is essentially locked out of the university’s resources that are dependent upon their maintaining good standing. Access control rules can even be used to codify business policies — transcript requests from former students might only be serviced if the requestor has no unmet financial obligations, or outstanding parking tickets, etc. In a like manner, students might only be eligible for extracurricular activities (such as sports, school sponsored recreational events, etc.) as long as they maintain a minimum grade point average. Prerequisites can be verified before allowing enrollment in a specific class or program, student health or vaccination records can be verified: thus, access control rules can take many different forms. And best of all, once the rules base has been captured, the process is automatic.

Security Policies Centrally and Easily Administered; Enterprise-Wide — With Jericho Systems, security is a function brought to the enterprise level. Currently, security is managed on an application-by-application basis. From the ground up, the EnterSpace Security Suite is built for distributed administration of the security policies, allowing the owners of the resources being managed to directly control the policies defining access throughout the enterprise. This is a substantial change from traditional security models, where access controls are maintained both by the programmers who implement the code that checks the ACL, and by the security groups who maintain the ACLs themselves. The requirements of the resource owners are thus at least two steps removed from the decision, and the ability to effect change in the security policy is frequently inhibited by programmer availability. With Jericho Systems’ products, policy changes can be implemented by the resource owners directly, in real-time, and will be reflected upon the very next access request decision made. In addition, the GUI for the management of security policies is built for the non-technical, but business-savvy administrator.

Quickly Leverage Current Enterprise Investments for Increased Security Functionality — The EnterSpace Security Suite is designed to quickly integrate with previously deployed technologies including; identity management and authentication mechanisms.

Secure, Detailed Logs Provide Single-Point Auditability — Each time a request is made, the EnterSpace Security Suite writes a detailed event log to a repository. This log contains ALL the information relevant to the decision, including the identity of the requestor, the resource the requestor tried to access, the version of the policy used to determine whether to grant the request, any/all data values used in making the decision and the resulting decision itself. This log can be written to almost any storage form, including WORM (Write Once, Read Many) devices for non-changeable audit logs, or a database for handling reporting and ad-hoc queries.

Real-Time Alarms Allow “Right-Now” Response to Inappropriate Requests — When a request is denied for any reason, the EnterSpace Security Suite provides a mechanism whereby an alarm condition may be delivered to a system responsible for notifying individuals or components to respond to the event. For example, assume an employee is attempting to access a secured resource that is highly sensitive: sensitive enough that any denied request should initiate an alarm. Within the tool’s security policy definition process, an option is available to cause an alarm condition to be raised upon denial. At run-time, when the user’s access attempt is denied, the EnterSpace Security Suite generates an alarm message which details the user’s identity, the resource requested, and the reasons for the denial; then delivers it to a system of your choice. This might be an SNMP interface to an enterprise management console, an alert to a paging system, or any other form of electronic notification.

Collaboration — While information has long been perceived as having value within the business environment, the true value is actually in the services and products that can be derived from it. And in order to do that, information must be shared among all the people and systems that have a part to play in bringing those services/ products to life. This collaborative process has been limited severely in the past by the inability to share information freely among the participants while maintaining security of the data itself. Like water in a lake, your data has enormous potential. The water realizes that potential when it is put into motion to create energy. By enabling the sharing of information securely, the EnterSpace Security Suite helps put your data into motion to create business value.

TO SUMMARIZE: With the EnterSpace Security Suite, Educational Organizations Gain Numerous Solutions; Including:

• Real-Time Access Management with Sensitivity to the Decision Context — As every request for access causes the evaluation of the appropriate security policy against user and situational attributes; fluid conditions like time-of-day, strength of authentication, etc., can be factored into access management polices.
• Create, Modify and Implement Enterprise Security Policies in Seconds — Security policies are managed by a common infrastructure and immediately affect the entire user community.
• Consistent Security Policy Evaluation, Enterprise-Wide — For secured resources under management by the software tool, the human element is eliminated from the evaluation process to improve security and reduce administrative costs.
• Distribute Security Policy Administration to Subject-Matter-Experts — Whoever owns the resource (application, function within an application, physical door, etc.) can administer the security policy for the resource without the need of software engineers.
• Flexible and Scaleable — While the EnterSpace Security Suite is built to work at the enterprise level; the tool's deployment can be limited to areas where current security models are ineffective or costly. This allows for quick and flexible impact. Pick the lowest hanging fruit first; then scale as needed. Resources that function well with existing security models can work side-by-side with resources that make use of the Suite for access management and authorization.
• Single Point Auditability — A secure event log captures information about the entire session, forming a single point for auditability and compliance purposes.
• Generate Alarms and Alerts at the Time of Attempted Violation — No need to parse through log files to find security breaches.
• Web Services Security, Single-Sign-On and Single-Sign-Out — One tool for an enterprise solution.
• Access Portals for Secured Interactive Environments and Self-Care — Controlled, 1-to-1 access portals are quickly enabled.
• Physical Security Management — The tool can also be used to manage physical security with the same consistent, rules-based infrastructure.

Educational Organizations’ ROI in Jericho Systems is Derived from:

• Increased Security, Access, Collaboration and REVENUE — through real-time authorization deriving permissions and entitlements at run-time increasing functionality and results.
• Decreased Costs — through minimized administration of security; lessen the administrative burden of security polices, access control lists, user groups and security audits.
• Decreased Costs — through increased productivity brought about by single-point auditability and real-time alarms and alerts.
• Decreased Costs – from dramatically improved collaboration and self-care functionality.
• Decreased Costs — of software engineering. Externalizing security decisioning to a callable network service can drastically reduce code bases and thereby application development cycle times.

The EnterSpace Security Suite can perform hundreds of thousands of authorization decisions per second, for user communities and resources (items to be secured) in the tens-of-millions, in a real-time, parallel scaling, fault-tolerant environment.