QCS Business software security™
A toolkit for software development organizations focused on Microsoft platforms
IT departments and software companies developing business applications need to provide higher levels of security than ever before to meet privacy and security requirements imposed by their user communities and by legal and regulatory requirements.
That adds to the size and complexity of the software design and development process, lengthening the project timeline and diverting scarce, talented resources from concentration on the actual business process that the software is to support.
Network appliances provide network-level security. Microsoft Windows provides security to the file level. Microsoft SQL Server provides security to the table level. The business software must provide further levels of security, limiting permissions granted to specific groups of users to:
- Certain columns in tables
- Certain rows in tables
- Certain functions that users can perform within the software
Having imposed that security, the application must develop a security management module so that an authorized user can set the permissions for each group of users to meet the requirements of the organization. The design team must still define what functions and data need to be under security control and document that for the developers. But thereafter the work gets much easier.
QCS Security consists of these components:
A COM+ object containing a set of API’s that the programmer can call. The API’s simply return a True or False response to the question: “Can this user in this business unit {Read | Add | Change | Delete} data in this function of this application? Or can this user Execute the function he or she wants to perform?
The programmer does not need to know anything about the logged-in user or what group or groups the user belongs to. The QCS Security COM+ object takes care of that.
A Security Management application, itself under QCS Security control, that provides the user interface and business logic for: Establishing a list of applications and functions within them; Adding and updating Groups and assigning each group the permissions its members are granted to the application functions; Adding and updating users and assigning them to groups. The security management application is a Microsoft .Net application developed in Visual C# using Visual Studio 2005.
A Security Design Guide to using the QCS Security toolkit in your development process.
This is proven software that has been used in numerous security-sensitive applications, including a state government agency whose software needed to have full HIPAA compliant security.
Ewarenow is an authorized reseller of QCS Security and has first-hand experience using it. For more information about the product, please contact us
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