The installation process of Tectia products is effortless and requires no changes to the operating system. Tectia Client can also be easily installed by the end users themselves if the security policy allows. Installations can also be managed with Tectia Manager which is a separate product for centralized deployment and maintenance of all Tectia software.

Tectia products allow complex security rules for connection setup, authentication, file transfers, and application tunneling definitions. The configuration files are defined in XML format by administrators.

On Windows, both Tectia Client and Server include also an intuitive GUI for locally configuring all relevant Secure Shell settings. The Connection Broker configuration can be edited in a GUI on Linux and Windows, and this tool is common to Tectia Client, ConnectSecure, and Tectia MFT Events.

Figure 3.2. Tectia Connections Configuration GUI - General settings view

The Tectia client/server solution can also be placed under control of Tectia Manager. For information, see Centralized Management with Tectia Manager.

When the Tectia products are managed centrally through Tectia Manager, Tectia Server and Connection Broker configuration GUIs restrict local configurations, which eliminates the possibility of unintentional user modifications through GUI.

To ease the end-user authentication, the Tectia client/server solution can be integrated with Windows domain authentication by using Kerberos/GSSAPI for fully transparent user authentication. Once the users are logged on to the domain, there is no need for additional interaction for Secure Shell user authentication.

The Tectia client/server solution provides easy and cost-effective means of securely replacing plaintext Telnet connections and file transfers in heterogeneous enterprise networks. Instead of plaintext connections to remote hosts, end users can use Tectia SSH Terminal that secures connections by encrypting all data. Alternatively, administrators can define that connections are automatically converted to secure SFTP or tunneled (encrypted) transparently to the users and their existing applications.

Figure 3.3. Tectia SSH Terminal for Secure Shell operations

Windows users are provided with Tectia Secure File Transfer user interface that allows users to securely drag-and-drop files between local Windows and remote Unix, Linux, Windows, and mainframe systems.

Figure 3.4. Tectia Secure File Transfer GUI