FullArmor Corp.'s GPAnywhere 2.5 took home the inaugural Gold Award in SearchWindowsSecurity.com's End Point Security contest. GPAnywhere extends Group Policy to machines that do not "live" on the Active Directory network.

GPAnywhere lets administrators take established security policies and enforce them on machines that might elude the reach of Active Directory. To do this, GPAnywhere creates what it calls Group Policy templates that exist as portable executable files. Administrators can distribute these executable files to client machines with any software distribution tool.

What makes GPAnywhere impressive is that all this can be done from a central console, namely the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) so that administrators are not creating multiple sets of policies for mobile devices or workstations.

GPAnywhere can be used to port Group Policy-based security policies to corporate laptops, workgroup computers, remote or home user desktop computers, Windows embedded devices, point-of-sale computers, bank ATMs, self-service kiosks, thin client terminals and even Windows 2000 and XP computers in Windows NT 4 or NDS domains.

FullArmor designed GPAnywhere to ensure that security policies can be uniformly enforced across an organization. By building upon Group Policy, GPAnywhere eliminates the need for a redundant policy management system for non-domain machines.

Judges were impressed with GPAnywhere's ability to solve a basic limitation of Group Policy by leveraging existing Group Policy features. Judges also pointed to its low cost as a prime reason that the tool separated itself from the competition.

In what is becoming a very crowded and increasingly difficult to define end point security market, GPAnywhere was able to claim the Gold Award by solving a common problem with a simple and cost-effective solution.

Pricing: GPAnywhere starts at $11 per managed machine.

SearchWindowsSecurity.com