It starts with discovery. Its number one feature is discovery. The discovery engine in BeyondTrust is off the charts. When they perform a discovery, you know everything there is about a server, including what software is installed. For example, if you want to group all of your database servers together, you can do that by using discovery and Smart Rules. If a server has Microsoft SQL installed, it gets put into a group based on a Smart Rule. It makes it very easy to determine what is what in your environment. As organizations grow or acquire other companies and merge, they lose track of what they have. BeyondTrust can help you throw a rope around it very rapidly. Its user interface is really nice. It is very visual. When you first log in, based on your job role, you see what you have access to when you look at the screen. As an administrator, I see the configuration screen where I can go in and modify Active Directory and authentication connections. I can set up SAML, or I also have access to create Smart Rules. The access is based on the role that you have when you log in. I have six boxes or six categories of administration items, whereas when an admin user connects, he would only have one or two. So, based on your role, you see what you have access to. It is not like you click something and then it fails because you're not an administrator at that level. You actually see what you have access to, and BeyondTrust is very good at that. BeyondTrust provides the ability to connect by using not just the web interface but also the admin tools such as MobaXterm, PuTTY, or a lengthy list of other types of tools. You can use the connection string and connect through BeyondTrust, and it will be session recorded, keystroke logged, and highly available. When you bring up MobaXterm, you probably bring up one of the most complex ones because MobaXterm has the ability to have two, three, or four concurrent connections, which makes BeyondTrust Password Safe ideal. It is very easy to integrate session management into existing business processes. To make it easy for the engineers, we created templates of the connection strings and then used, believe it or not, Microsoft Excel to create custom strings for each of the engineers. We exported them to a text file that they could then import. In the case of PuTTY, because PuTTY stores the connections and the credentials in the registry, we had to do something different there, but the connection string is customizable enough to make the job fast and easily repeatable for all the other engineers. You don't have 20 or 30 engineers spending two or three days creating all these connection strings. I can create them in a matter of minutes with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and then save them to a text file or a CSV file. It is awesome. We are able to integrate session management without disrupting business processes. One of the niceties about BeyondTrust is the ability to integrate it with ticketing systems. For example, as per Sarbanes-Oxley, we have to have a reason for why an administrator is performing something. The integration with a ticketing system is ideal rather than manually typing the reason in the reason field through the GUI where most engineers, after a while, end up just typing in Work. They don't put in enough data to make it clearly visible why they connected. The integration with the ticketing system is ideal for that. Ticket-driven access makes the work very quantifiable.
