eTelemetry's Locate Network Appliance

Now here’s a very clever idea that we keep thinking of innovative uses for. eTelemetry's Locate is a plug-and-play network appliance offering a top-down view of all desktop-computing assets, the people using them, and where they are physically located. Locate recently won the Best Enterprise Hardware Product award at the Corporate and Channel Computing Expo. It works by passively analyzing network packets without installing any software agents and it shows all the people on the network in real-time by name as well as by physical location, switch port, department, and phone number. It also provides tools to dynamically track assets and react to network issues including unauthorized users, equipment moves, and acceptable use policy violations. The archived information also becomes a system of record of who's been where on the network for forensic analysis and compliance.

Locate was chosen for the C3 hardware award for its ease of identifying and tracking the person behind the anonymous IP address.

"As organizations perfect the systems security process of audit integrity, eTelemetry's Locate becomes an incredibly productive tool for tracking an organization's best assets: its people and computing machinery," said Tom Henderson, principal researcher for ExtremeLabs, and head of the judging team. "The judges had a number of interesting candidates for the Best Enterprise Hardware product and Locate's sophisticated tracking mechanisms were in a class above the rest of the competition."

eTelemetry's Locate Network appliance was tested on Microsoft's Active Directory, where users were matched with IP address and location by Locate's proprietary engine. By connecting Locate on the network at strategic points, user/asset tracking was fully automated and records were easily transported to reporting mechanisms. This helps organizations comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA regulations, an important issue facing today's network managers. According to C3, Locate was also able to help "zero-day/zero-minute" virus/malware detection.