NetIQ Announces NetIQ Change Guardian for Active Directory

NetIQ Corp. (NASDAQ: NTIQ), a leading provider of integrated systems and security management solutions, today announced the availability of the NetIQ Change Guardian(TM) for Active Directory product (NetIQ Change Guardian), a change monitoring and auditing solution for Microsoft Active Directory. NetIQ Change Guardian delivers enhanced risk and compliance management and security capabilities for Active Directory environments through real-time monitoring and detailed reporting of changes.

With this new solution, NetIQ continues to deliver upon its Operational Change Control product line, which is a key component of NetIQ's Knowledge-Based Service Assurance strategy. NetIQ's Knowledge-Based Service Assurance products provide customers with knowledge and tools to better ensure that their IT environment is secure, available, performing optimally and also compliant with legal and corporate policies.

Kindred Healthcare, an existing NetIQ Security Manager(TM) and NetIQ® Directory and Resource Administrator(TM) customer, recognizes the value of bridging operational change control and change audit that the Change Guardian product can deliver to organizations.

"We believe the Change Guardian product will provide essential real-time alerting and auditor-friendly forensic reporting on past changes, which go a long way to meeting Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA compliance," said Kelley Ealy, senior security analyst at Kindred Healthcare, Inc., a U.S. healthcare services company. "NetIQ Change Guardian will automate the manually-intensive process of cataloguing and classifying all changes made across an Active Directory environment to help increase the level of security."

Extending Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 Capabilities

Many organizations currently utilize Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) to centrally monitor the performance and availability of their Windows environment. With NetIQ Change Guardian, those same organizations can leverage and extend their MOM deployment to provide change control for Active Directory. This unique approach has the potential to offer immediate return on investment with minimal impact on the existing IT environment.

"We are very pleased that NetIQ, a Microsoft Management Alliance Partner and member of the SecureIT Alliance, is extending the monitoring capabilities and features of Microsoft Operations Manager with NetIQ Change Guardian," said Felicity McGourty, director of marketing at Microsoft. "NetIQ Change Guardian will help meet the SecureIT Alliance's goal of achieving greater integration of enterprise security products and will give our customers additional capabilities for controlling change in their Active Directory environment."

About NetIQ Change Guardian

NetIQ Change Guardian provides the following benefits:

--  Monitors changes based on risk to the Active Directory environment --
    Typically organizations experience a high volume of changes in their Active
    Directory environment. NetIQ Change Guardian provides organizations
    flexibility in how they are alerted to changes and aids in the
    prioritization of responses by grouping changes into the following
    categories:

    --    Managed changes -- Audits changes made through an authorized change
    process, such as the Directory and Resource Administrator product, enabling
    the audit of both recent and historical changes to satisfy compliance
    requirements and validate authorized changes.

    --    Unmanaged changes -- Identifies changes made outside of the change
    process, such as an unauthorized administrator changing user accounts
    directly, allowing organizations to quickly react and investigate why the
    defined change process was circumvented.

    --    High-profile changes -- Monitors and reports on changes to critical
    objects within Active Directory, such as the Domain Admins group, providing
    organizations with rapid feedback on changes that may grant extended
    privileges or access to sensitive information.

--  Enhances existing Active Directory change processes -- Organizations
    quickly benefit by not having to redesign their existing change process,
    even when that process is ad-hoc in nature, providing an immediate ability
    to monitor and audit changes across Active Directory environments.

--  Leverages common infrastructures -- With NetIQ Change Guardian,
    organizations do not have the typical concerns associated with deploying an
    entirely new infrastructure. This allows them to quickly experience
    effective change monitoring and auditing.

"Many companies face significant challenges in securing and controlling changes to Active Directory," said John Enck, vice president at Gartner Inc. "They are in need of products that bring administration, auditing and alerting together as part of an integrated solution."

"Changes to Active Directory are necessary, but have to be guarded carefully, as organizations must satisfy compliance, security and delegation requirements," said Dave Peterson, group product manager, NetIQ. "NetIQ Change Guardian is the first product to bridge our Active Directory expertise into a broader suite of change control offerings."