Review: Secuware Security Framework 4.0

For: A strong product from a technical perspective. Against: Not as polished as other enterprise-class offerings. Verdict: Although technically sound, the product is a bit pricey and suffers from some quality issues.

This review was conducted under group test conditions. Click here for the complete Group Test.

Secuware Security Frame­work 4.0 is a directory ser­vice integrated product that contains a server and client soft­ware app used to manage whole disk or file/folder encryption poli­cies.

The server component installs using many common LDAP-integrated directory services. Clients are managed from either a standalone local policy or domain policy that is pushed down from the central directory service.

Installation of the product was fairly straightforward. We tested the server software within our Windows 2003 Active Directory environment, and installed the cli­ent component, Crypt2000, on our test Windows XP SP2 machines.

From a technical perspective, Secuware does a great job of explaining the granular technical details of its features, including pre-boot authentication, mul­tifactor support, and its overall approach and methodology to cryptography.

This includes lock­ing down peripheral devices, as well as the entire hard disk, using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit encryption. This is definitely a strong point.

During our testing, we noticed that we were not able to remove or uninstall the client software from our endpoints. Even from a centralised server perspec­tive, the ability to remove client components was notably absent. Secuware informed us that this is only provided to the client if they require it.

We were sent a diff erent client component that contained a method for removal once we requested it. Also, we did not see any monitoring features that allowed us to actually verify if a policy or configuration was pushed down to an object.

Therefore, we were not able to see the progress associated with encrypting a drive, or how long it took.

Although documentation was provided and was helpful in a general sense, we found a few translation issues in converting the documentation and the soft­ware into English.

From a support perspective, we were unsure what was included. However, Secuware does off er 24/7 support as an option.

Pricing is US$144 per seat for up to 100 seats, and volume pricing for 501-1,000 seats is US$84 per seat. The administration console is available at an additional charge of US$5,000. We found this to be high given the unpolished nature of the product.

See original article on SC Magazine US

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