My name is Eric Jensen, I’m the lead Product Manager for the Gears family of products here at OPSWAT. Starting today, I’ll be posting about new releases, features, use cases, customers, partners, and anything else worth sharing! We just had a release of Gears Cloud this week, with several exciting new features.
First I’ll mention a major new feature: Gears Cloud now supports managing servers! In addition to monitoring endpoints, you can now use the same interface to make sure your OS and security tools are up to date in the server room as well.
In addition, we added capabilities for integrating Gears Cloud to existing solutions:
Web Services Integration
SSO and other web services can now easily integrate Gears into their authentication routine, with very little effort. All that's required is a little piece of code to enable a file download containing a unique ID of the current browsing session. That information is passed to Gears Client running on the endpoint, which in turns shares the ID with Gears Cloud. Once Gears Cloud has (temporarily) associated the session ID with a given endpoint, your web service simply makes a RESTful query to Gears Cloud for the session ID. With those easy steps, you can determine real-time compliance of devices accessing your network.
Windows Registry, OSX PList
We’ve made it dead simple for applications running on the endpoint itself to assess compliance as well. Once you define your compliance policy using the Gears Cloud admin interface, that policy gets pushed to every Gears Client under management. The client will then begin reporting to the Windows Registry whether the system is in compliance or not. All your app needs to test for compliance is a simple registry check! We can achieve similar functionality on Mac OSX using the PList; the dev team is working on that right now.
We also added a number of other features and UI enhancements. These include new admin monitoring capabilities, more device details, and more powerful sorting/filtering functions.
With Gears Cloud, anyone can assess the security status of devices connecting to their network, before they actually connect. Our focus remains on making Gears Cloud a more powerful management platform with each new release. This includes elegant and powerful ways to connect Gears to your cloud, web service or web application. In the coming months, you can expect to hear about new Gears capabilities regularly. Stay tuned!
