The guys over at BeyondTrust have come out with a cool new (and free) tool for helping folks get to "least privileged use" (i.e., users are not admins on their workstations) on Windows more quickly. This product is a nice compliment to their Privilege Manager Group Policy extension for allowing elevation based on white lists of applications. Essentially the new product, called BeyondTrust Application Rights Auditor, lets you audit application usage on your Windows desktops to determine which applications will require administrative elevation to function properly. Using such a tool, you can more quickly make adjustments to your Windows system security, or use a product like Privilege Manager, to get to a point where you can remove administrator access on your systems. This is a great tool to have and very cool that they are making it available for free.
Tags:
BeyondTrust, Privilege Manager, Application Rights Auditor, Group Policy
MAR
About the Author:
Darren Mar-Elia is CTO & Founder of SDM Software, Inc. Darren has over 25 years of IT and Software experience in the Microsoft technology area, including serving as a Director in Infrastructure at Charles Schwab, CTO of Windows Management Solutions at Quest Software, and Sr. Director of Product Engineering at DesktopStandard. He has been a Microsoft MVP in Group Policy technology for the last 6 years and has written and spoken on Active Directory, Group Policy and PowerShell topics frequently over the years. He maintains the popular Group Policy resource web site at www.gpoguy.com and has been a contributing editor for Windows IT Pro Magazine since 1997. He has written and contributed to twelve books on Windows. Darren also speaks frequently at conferences on Windows infrastructure topics.