Universal Policy Administrator provides you with a centralized security policy management, orchestration, and enforcement solution. The result is a consistent and uniform set of policies across all enterprise devices and identities, on-premise, and within the cloud. This also simplifies configuration and security for users and devices and delivers an automated, centralized, and consistent policy management solution with automated enforcement covering various endpoints, including Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The following features are included in this release:

• Policy consolidation, create, test, and deploy processes
• Single delegated web console for managing security policies
• Reporting including relative set of policies and conflict analysis

Why DO I Need UPA?

If you have multiple sites and administrators, on-premise and in cloud virtual machines, a mix of server OS’s and you want to have consistent policies (Group Policies, password policies, etc.) across all of those, you need UPA. Even if you must report the system configurations, you can report effective policies on users and devices.  

Requirements

UPA requires an on-premises gateway and agents. Agents are installed on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Windows Server 2012 and higher are required for Windows, while most Linux platforms are supported with required packages. Of note on Linux requires the .Net Core 2.1 and all its prerequisites. 

The product has been tested with up to 1 million Active Directory objects and has minimal requirements 4 CPU cores, 16gb of RAM, and 100GB of disk space.  

Installing

Installing the software starts with the on-premises gateway. The gateway is supported through NAT Traversal, DMZ, or Port forwarding. 

This makes system placement simple to manage based upon your security requirements. The system will need access to Active Directory and require a Domain Admin account (to read GPO’s). There is a similar Azure Cloud Gateway in setup and configuration. 

The documentation has a walkthrough on how to install the gateway.

The other component is the agents. Agents are used to managing individual machines. In the case of Windows systems, this is for non-domain joined systems. 

In the future, we hope to see integration with Azure AD/Intune for managing Azure-AD joined systems.  

USING THE PRODUCT

The web interface is a simple to use web interface. Once you have deployed the gateway and import in your local active directory, you can import your current policies in your active directory environment. Once you import your agents, you can then create multiple Universal Policies that will be applied. For example, a password expiration policy can be created for 45 days and applied to AD, stand-alone Windows, Linux, and Mac devices with the agent installed.  

One of the more essential features we tested was the approving of universal policies. All policies must be approved before you can use them. Once you create a policy, you then submit it for approval. The system will send an email to the required admin(s) and check the policy for conflicts before approval.  

SUMMARY

By using Universal Policy Administrator, you can consolidate and create a standard set of policies across all of your operating systems. Contact Concensus today to get a demo! We sell, support, and implement a wide variety of Micro Focus products. Also, check out our pre-recorded webinar!

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