Cams™ Overview

Cams is secure, flexible and affordable web single sign-on and access management software that centrally controls access to web and application servers, and more. You decide who gets access to which resources and Cams enforces your business security policies. Secure resources protected by Cams can reside on the corporate intranet or be publicly available over the Internet; and they can be a static file such as a an HTML or PDF document, or dynamic web applications written in any web programming language including ASP, ASP.Net, JSP/Servlet, ColdFusion, PHP, Perl and more.

Authentication, Access Control and Web Single Sign-on

Cams makes your web sites more secure and manageable by centralizing authentication, access control, and administration within a comprehensive web security platform. Built using security best practices, Cams eliminates the need for your developers to create and deploy user authentication and access control within web application code. This centralized approach to web security enables you to reduce development and administration complexity and costs while improving time to market, security and user satisfaction.

Using Cams to protect your resources delivers web single sign-on to users by sharing authentication (who you are) and access control (what you are allowed to do) information through a user security session that transparently spans your site's web and application servers. Cams provides support to enable strong password policies and multi-factor user authentication using username/passwords, X.509 digital certificates, smart cards, tokens such as VASCO Digipass and RSA SecurID.

To control access to your web resources, Cams provides role-based access control (RBAC) in a feature-rich rules library that also includes location, date/time, HTTP attribute and SQL data constraint rules. Another powerful Cams access control feature called obligations enables a Cams security policy decision to force a Cams web agent to do something, such as redirect a user to a different URL than the one originally requested. The Cams access control service is a powerful component that enables you to implement and enforce your business security policy in a flexible and easy to manage way.

Performance and Failover

A scalable design enables Cams to flexibly integrate with your existing network architecture and meet your performance requirements. Cams utilizes caching at both the Cams web agent and Cams policy server to increase the speed of security decisions. Load balancing and failover is achieved by distributing requests across Cams web agents (which are installed in your web and application servers) and through clustering of any number of Cams policy server on the backend. The Cams approach requires minimal additional hardware to achieve optimal performance while using security best practices.

User Directory Integration

For user authentication, Cams provides the most robust and flexible architecture available today. Cams integrates with industry-standard Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP servers and SQL databases. Should your user accounts be distributed over multiple user directories you can configure Cams to use more than one user directory for the same user authentication. The product deploys quickly into heterogeneous environments providing a centralized, robust web security platform. There's no need for painful user database synchronization or the addition of new user directories.

Open and Extensible

An abundance of open Cams programmer libraries and tools speed the application development process and help guarantee results. Java Technology™ Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) empower programmers to easily and flexibly customize Cams to meet business requirements. For example, if you require support for authentication through a non-standard user directory configuration, you use the Cams implementation of the JAAS (Java Authentication and Authorization Service) API and provided open source login module examples to create a new authentication module. Or, if a custom access control rule is required to restrict access based on a user-specific database value, Cams libraries enable you to create and centrally deploy the new access control rule for use with all of your web applications. Cams includes open source code for all product components implemented using public Cams APIs.

Download Cams

The complete Cams release is is available via download for evaluation upon request. Before making your request, we strongly recommend that you take the online Cams Tour to interactively learn more about Cams and web security.