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When deciding on a single sign-on solution, it's important you understand the impact it will have on your environment. One of the biggest pain points is the client software. The majority of the singal sign-on solutions use one or more third-party daemons, installed on each of your clients, to connect to the centralized authentication solution. There are inherent risks associated with this that need to be considered. For instance, if these daemons go down, you will not be able to sign onto the client using the centralized authentication. This also introduces new software that must be kept up to date on all of your servers. And there is a general distaste for installing third-party software on production machines.
ABRAuth does not install any daemons on your clients. Instead, our software uses the existing software you already have on your client (e.g. PAM) to configure the authentication redirection. This makes support much easier as the admin team is likely already familiar with this software and this also avoids having to stay on top of additional software updates and patches.
Most centralized authentication software you find require that you have your own Microsoft Active Directory solution in place. This can be a fine solution if you have the resources, both technical and financial, for its maintenance. Active Directory requires a significantly different technical skillset than those of Linux or Unix. In addition, licensing for Active Directory has a significant cost itself.
For more on Microsoft pricing, see here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/pricing.aspx
ABRAuth includes the industry standards MIT Kerberos and OpenLDAP so there is no need to use a separate Active Directory instance. All users and devices are maintained within the appliances themselves.
There are many reasons why a company may desire to use an existing Active Directory installation for their centralized authentication solution.
Not a problem.
ABRAuth can sync with your existing Active Directory allowing you to take advantage of ABRAuth's centralized authentication and authorization capabilities while maintaining synchronized users and passwords with Active Directory.
A large Internet company needed a centralized solution for their lab environment consisting of 900 hosts with upwards of 600 users that would need access. Below is the quote they received from one of our major competitors:
Our competition:
| 900 Host Licenses | $182,000 |
| 600 User Licenses | $17,760 |
| Total | $199,760 |
ABRAuth Pricing:
| 900 Host Licenses | $89,100 |
| 600 User Licenses | $11,400 |
| Total | $99,500 |
| Savings with ABRAuth | $100,260 (50.2%) |