Secure Service Account Management

CriticalSites Service Account Controller for Windows®, Enterprise Edition^TM

Service Account Controller for Windows®, Enterprise Edition is a powerful security and compliance tool for the management of Windows Services.

Feature Highlights

After surveying thousands of organizations, five goals were distilled and turned into a tightly focused solution:

Risk Abatement: Risk can be measured, minimized and hedged – giving your organization the means to achieve ultimate security and prevent massive potential losses.
Protect Servers: Service Account passwords can quickly be changed across a distributed network – allowing you to implement the most secure password policies and close this gapping security hole in your network.
Minimize Setup Time: Properties of a service can be CLONED & propagated to other servers – making the setup process (and future changes) quick / flawless; driving costs down to the floor.
Network-Wide Reporting: Robust real-time network-wide reporting across the entire network – makes monitoring and making changes a snap.
Zero Effort Reporting: Reporting can be fully automated & scheduled – making ongoing maintenance & reporting as simple as receiving an email.

Detailed Overview

Risk Abatement
Everyday storage professionals are peppered with a hail of security warnings about imminent threats. Organizations don’t know what to work on first, and no one knows how secure they “REALLY” are until their security has been breached; by then it’s too late. It is almost impossible to quantify how secure your Network is.

What is needed is a Metric, something that can measure the relative vulnerability of your entire network against a benchmark you create. A consistent measuring stick empowers your organization to measure both its’ successes and its failures.

Most importantly, measuring against a standard allows your organization to continually minimize its risk by empowers incremental process improvements over time.

Service Account Controller through its “Risk Index” provides both the metric and the means by which to measure.

Protect Servers
Windows Service accounts enjoy the same level of authority as a Super Administrator would; namely, absolute control. Since Windows service passwords can only be changed manually on each individual server, the implementation and maintenance of a secure password policy across
a distributed network is challenging, at best.

Although the passwords should be changed regularly, up until now there hasn’t been a cost effective way to execute network-wide password changes across a distributed network. In practice, Windows Server passwords are changed infrequently, and generally these changes DO NOT occur even when they are obviously necessary.

Every time a Network Administrator leaves your company, he or she leaves with the passwords to the most powerful accounts on your network, and an intimate knowledge of its architecture. To compound this risk, recent legislation clearly places the fiscal responsibility to end users on the shoulders of companies protecting data.

Service Account Controller allows you to change the passwords on all servers across a distributed network.

“Companies have the opportunity to close a major security loophole by eliminating the need for their administrators knowing the passwords for service accounts solving the single most common issue on windows networks today. ”

Patrick Hynds,
Microsoft Regional Director of Boston

Minimize Setup Time
One of the most time consuming functions of managing Windows Services on a Network is replicating and maintaining “standard sets” of services to run on specific types of servers.

For example, most organizations want all of their FTP servers to have the exact same, FTP specific, Windows(?) Services running. To replicate the exact set of Services on all the FTP servers an administrator would have to painstakingly setup each individual server with the appropriate Services. Of course, making any changes to the “standard setup” would involve going back into each individual server and making the adjustments manually across the entire network.

Service Account Controller allows you to CLONE the properties of services from one server and propagate them to other servers within your network.

Network-Wide Reporting
Currently, the way to see what services are running on a given server is to log into that server and observe the services. Making changes to services would, by necessity, have to occur while you are physically at the server. It isn’t hard to do the math here --- network-wide changes over a distributed network would take a very long time and would be prone to human error.

To properly manage Windows Services across a distributed network you need to be able to see, in real time, what services are running and be able to make necessary changes to those Services across the entire distributed network.

Service Account Controller provides a robust real-time network-wide management & reporting infrastructure.

Zero Effort Reporting
In life there are two certainties: death & taxes. In business, taxes are still a certainty and death comes in the form of reporting. Reporting is ongoing and never-ending. Next to set-up, the second most time consuming function is the running of routine reporting.

Service Account Controller provides a full command line interface as well as reporting by email. The coupling of these two functions means that all of your reporting can be automated, scheduled and ultimately delivered to you by email on your schedule.