Over the last 6 months we have worked with customers to complete an astonishing range of implementations. As part of this work, we tried to learn something from each customer and roll those requested features, lessons, and needed improvements into the latest version of our product. The revision history list we put up on the web site barely scratches the surface of the evolutionary work accomplished by our development team.

Overall we added a ton of new features, made configuration of complex environments much easier by providing import/export of configuration settings, added Windows DSRM support, SAP support, improved SSH speed by 20x-50x, further improved scalability and speed for monster-sized enterprises, cloud providers, ISP and MSPs. We also made major changes to the web application to organize and display vast amounts of per-system and per-account data. We even spruced up the web interface to provide easier skinning. And, of course, lots of bug fixes, more targets for propagation, reworking of dialogs per customer feedback, and improvements in just about every area of the product.

There were a few things we were working on that did not make the final release schedule in December, but we are working on a slipstream release of 4.83.3 with updated documentation. We are hoping that a few of the features we were not able to get into the December general release make it into the slipstream release coming out in the next few weeks.

Do You Store Sensitive Data on Shared Spreadsheets?

Hint: Something New in 4.83.3 Has Shipped…

Do you store your sensitive credentials and other secrets on spreadsheets or in Microsoft SharePoint, Lotus Notes, or other shared file repositories? One of our customers was faced with a scenario of having over 500+ spreadsheets containing sensitive data. After an audit, their auditors were not happy that there was no real tracking or need for employee justification for access to sensitive spreadsheet information. Further, spreadsheets provided no way to achieve the disclosure of the minimal amount of information for specific purposes. Does any of this sound familiar (i.e. too much access to information without any justification)?

To solve this problem, version 4.83.3 of both ERPM and RPM adds a new module (free upgrade to existing customers under support) called the Password Spreadsheet Manager (PSM) module. This module allows you to mass import all of your sensitive data spreadsheets (CSV files), mass import permission rules for the sheets (CSV files), and use the existing access, authorization, auditing, encryption, and integrations of ERPM and RPM to control access to the data.

The outcome of using this new module is the total removal of unsecure spreadsheets floating around, controlled and audited access to specific rows (minimal knowledge and minimal disclosure) of data, and the solution to a big problem. Because we are using a serious database for our backend storage and because we don’t license by users, administrators or secrets, you can store an unlimited amount of information accessed by an unlimited number of users and administrators for no extra cost if you already own RPM or ERPM.

But I already have a Secure File Vault…

You might wonder why Password Spreadsheet Manager is needed if we already provide a secure and encrypted file vault/file store in our product.

Simple: Once someone checks out a spreadsheet file, you really don’t know who has seen/shared access the data, and to a degree, you don’t know how the specific pieces of information on the spreadsheet will be used (limited accountability). Spreadsheet files, once they are transferred from a secure storage system give up all their secrets in one shot. Without any sort of Digital Rights Management (DRM) on the file, it can be shared, printed, etc.

With spreadsheets, you also lose track of which rows of secret data were used for which purposes. By converting public spreadsheets into collections of encrypted rows of data where each sheet and specific row needs to be requested/recovered/justified, you now have a system that provides accountability and audited controls. The secrets on the spreadsheet might be passwords, but they could just as well be PIN codes, phone numbers, account numbers, or any other piece of sensitive information that you need to control access to.

Solutions to simple problems are important

Although we are well known for our sophisticated technology for privileged identity management with features like auto-discovery, correlation and propagation; sometimes just getting rid of an out-of-control information proliferation problem is just what the doctor ordered.

Standalone Password Spreadsheet Manager

We will be offering the PSM module with our secure file storage system as a standalone product in Q1 2012 at a very attractive price. We will have more details about the standalone version in an upcoming newsletter.