Content

Nowell Shalom Security Platform v3.0

Nowell Shalom Security Platform is a cloud-based security as a service (SaaS) offering that is intended to protect against malicious insiders and impos­tors stealing information and committing fraud inside the corporate network. The offer­ing is geared to defend against insider threats, identity theft and internal fraud.

The tool is an anomaly detec­tion system that looks out for suspicious activity by computer users. It offers an intelligent authentication mechanism that looks for a user who exhibits suspicious behavior. It detects suspicious activity on the network by monitor­ing user accessed remote hosts and ports. Shalom also detects user anomalies with respect to hardware-specific variables, such as processor architecture, processor level, processor mask, OEM I.D., minimum/maximum application address and memory page size.

Once identified as suspicious, a user is reported to the central console and then presented a set of challenge questions to vali­date their identity. If the chal­lenge questions are answered correctly, the installed agent will allow the user to continue to reside on the network. If the challenge questions are answered incorrectly, the user is logged off the network.

The management and moni­toring is provided as a cloud solution. There is an agent that is loaded on the individual hosts. Automated deployment options are available for attend­ed or unattended agent instal­lation. The agent is required to communicate with the hosted servers. This communication appeared to work well without noticeable latency.

We found the reporting to be somewhat lacking com­pared to the other solutions we reviewed. Email alerting on events is supported and was easy to configure.

This offering can provide an additional level of user identity management. We liked the concept and, properly managed, it can provide an additional level of protection. As with all anomaly detection systems, it has to rely on a good baseline of "normal" behavior.
Product title
Nowell Shalom Security Platform v3.0
Product info
Name: Nowell Shalom Security Platform v3.0 Description: Price: $4.99 per user per month
Strength
Provides an extra layer of user identity management.
Weakness
Reporting; relies completely on anomaly detection of learned environment.
Verdict
Nice addition to a layered identity management program or as a standalone identity management solution.

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