DNA User Guide › Introduction › CA RCM Technology

CA RCM Technology

CA RCM is based on advanced pattern recognition technology. CA RCM provides a comprehensive set of highly sophisticated solutions to the challenges that organizations face when implementing and maintaining role-based management.

Core Technology

An important innovation of CA RCM lies in the observation that role-based management revolves around patterns of privileges and access. As such, even in an organization where privileges are not currently managed by roles, the actual assignment of privileges roughly follows role-based patterns. Similarly, deviations and exceptions should be detectable when they do not follow same patterns.

CA RCM's technology is designed to uncover the patterns that are hidden in existing sets of privileges. This is not trivial, since the number of excessive privileges may sometimes reach 50% of the total number of privileges. Many users may also be under-privileged or wrongly-privileged. Furthermore, the problem is extremely complex due to the sheer number of user accounts typical of large enterprises. CA RCM combines a set of pattern recognition techniques and other advanced algorithms and applies them to the special challenges of roles management.

Other Technology Components

In addition to this core technology, CA has developed substantial additional technology that is required to deploy a full solution:

• CA RCM products use sophisticated algorithms that help the user make intelligent decisions, while hiding most of the complexity of the problems they address.
• CA RCM products use sophisticated data structures and algorithms in order to reduce the CPU and memory load to the point where a CA RCM project can be fully implemented on a single PC.
• CA RCM architecture is designed to allow easy mapping of privileges data from virtually any ACL-based platform/application, including most operating systems, databases, directories, applications, and of course, identity management and provisioning systems.
• CA RCM's user-friendly interface facilitates importing privileges data from a common or proprietary platform and exporting processed data and role definitions to this or another target platform.