Sun Microsystems have highlighted continued success across its identity management initiatives through new customer relationships. In addition, Sun has positioned identity management as a key component of its overall software strategy and has aligned its organisation, product strategy, and dedicated global sales force to address this growing business concern for its customers and prospects worldwide.

META Group, an independent IT research consulting firm, has named Sun as a market leader in Identity Management (IM) - User Provisioning. "Identity management is a key service that allows companies to cost-effectively and securely manage identities for accessing IT and corporate resources. It is a growing software market segment, one that has steadily risen in importance and stature on everyone's lists-- not only IT infrastructure, but information security, application development and business services. It has become vital to the success of enterprises addressing key compliance, regulatory and security concerns, and has equal planning status to ERP and CRM programs in some cases," said Earl Perkins, vice president, security and risk strategies, META Group.

The Sun identity management suite provides organizations with visibility into and control over the way critical corporate assets are accessed and shared, while delivering high service levels affordably. It is uniquely suited to meet the challenges of the virtual enterprise by allowing organisations to open access to employees, partners and customers and at the same time, protect its mission-critical systems. Lacking these controls, organisations leave themselves open to security breaches, regulatory compliance issues, inefficiencies in operations and productivity losses.

According to this report, Sun qualifies for joint 'top-spot' due to its market share and credibility, the strength of its feature/function set - specifically in its ability to leverage and re-use existing data stores and integrate them with existing systems - as well as its global reach and significant production deployments across all market sectors.

Sun's identity management solutions include:

Sun Java System Identity Manager: A complete user provisioning and meta-directory solution that enhances enterprise security.

Sun Java System Access Manager: An open, standards-based authentication and policy-based authorisation with a single, unified framework. It secures the delivery of essential identity and application information by offering single sign-on (SSO) and enables federation across trusted networks of partners, suppliers and customers.

Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition: A central repository for storing and managing identity profiles, access privileges and application and network resource information.

Sun Java System Identity Auditor: With this solution, a proactive and automated review of identity controls is performed to help ensure compliance and improve audit performance.

Sun's compatibility with third-party products and industry standards allows customers the choice of personalising their identity infrastructure to meet their specific needs.

This solution is available through Singlesource Consultancy Services; for more information please contact sales@singlesource.co.uk

 Storage Problems and Solutions

Industrial-Strength Data Protection

A sound backup and recovery solution is your insurance policy to guard against data loss.

At Singlesource we have recently added Veritas solutions to our product portfolio. This means that we are now able to provide advanced professional software for storage and server management. We also have our own experienced installation engineers who can configure the set up to your exact requirements.

VERITAS NetBackup Enterprise Server delivers high performance data protection that scales to protect the largest UNIX, Windows, Linux and NetWare environments. Offering complete protection from desktop to data centre to vault, NetBackup software offers a single management tool to consolidate all backup and recovery operations, while providing cutting-edge management, alerting, reporting, and troubleshooting technologies. NetBackup helps organisations take advantage of both tape and disk storage with its advances in disk and snapshot-based protection, off-site media management, and automated disaster recovery. To ensure data protection and availability as a utility, organisations can manage all aspects of backup and recovery using intuitive, graphical user interfaces, allowing consistent backup policies to be enforced across the enterprise. To reduce the impact on business critical systems, NetBackup software provides online database and application aware backup and recovery solutions for all leading databases and applications to deliver data availability for Utility Computing.

There is no better time for your customers to discover Netbackup.

Veritas worships Sun

Veritas Software has extended its storage management and high availability offerings to include full support of Sun's Solaris 10 operating system. Veritas has also released versions 4.1 of its Storage Foundation, Cluster Server and Volume Replicator software.