ManageEngine continues our weekly blog series called Talk to ME Tuesday. Each week we discuss interesting topics from the world of technology with you, the people that live and breathe it everyday.

“If you just make your policy based on IP addresses and ports, the traditional way, it’s very difficult to see if that’s really aligned with the business objectives,” said Stijn Vanveerdeghem, Technical Marketing Engineer for Intrusion Protection Systems (IPS) for Cisco. “User identity really makes it easier to make your [security and networking] policy in line with your business policy.”

Cisco’s solution for user identity management is Cisco Security Manager (CSM) which is an enterprise-level management solution for ASA, IPS, and security features on Cisco IOS. In the demo, Vanveerdeghem shows the management screen which simply presents a list of your devices, the policies that you’re managing, and the access roles that can be assigned.

The benefit of user identity management is you can very simply deliver different policies for different groups. In the example Vanveerdeghem showed, it’s easy to just set up a security definition for the entire marketing group, and another one for the entire engineering group.