In mid-May a new company, Rohati, built by former employees of Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Cavium, unveiled its new product line.
Rohati's new appliances and software products provide entitlement management with granular transparent control over access to resources inside corporate networks and are without the need for agents or changes to applications and network topology. The solution can help reduce or eliminate the need for software developers to build such controls directly into their applications.
The solution fills a big gap in current network security architecture. For example, the solution supports many types of directory services and can narrow access rights using a virtual directory that 'normalizes' attributes from other directory services such as Active Directory, LDAP, etc., so that entitlement control can work across all applications in an enterprise regarding of the operating systems in use on servers and desktops.
The solution can also be rolled out with relative ease and, according to Shane Buckley, president and CEO at Rohati, it's approximately 90 percent cheaper than integrating entitlement control directly into existing applications. Buckley said that the company's solutions work at network layer 7, which allows for fine grain control since user identity information is available at that level. Once placed on a network, the solution initially watches traffic to collect data regarding what applications a user accesses. With that data ACLs can be created to help ensure users only access authorized applications. The solution can also track and log various types of activity, such as financial transactions, at a fine-grain level, which can be useful for compliance management.
The company will offer two appliances, the TNS100 for small- and mid-size business or business departments, and the TNS500 for higher performance needs. The TNS100 carries a list price of just under $20,000 and can scale up to 4Gbps of traffic and handle 250,000 simultaneous connections. The TNS500 will have a list price of $85,000 and can be scaled to support up to 40Gbps of traffic and 6 million simultaneous connections.
"As companies open up their networks, data, and applications to customers, employees, and partners, they must be able to cost-effectively administer and enforce entitlement policies in line with business intent across any and all applications and users," said Shane Buckley, president and CEO of Rohati Systems.
Rohati expects their offerings to go head to head with Cisco's Securent policy management software. Cisco announced its deal to acquire Securent in November 2007 for $100 million in cash. At that time company representatives said that "Securent's software offers enterprises a single point of control to define and manage entitlements across applications and data. This capability is well aligned with Cisco's Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA), enabling policy decisions to be delivered as a network service across multiple applications, platforms, and delivery models."
Rohati is backed by venture capitalist groups Matrix Partners and Foundation Capital. So far the company has received at least $11 million in funding.