Many companies restrict website access to valid users only, and control the level of access permitted to each user. The authentication, authorization, and auditing feature allows a site administrator to manage access controls with the NetScaler appliance instead of managing these controls separately for each application. Doing authentication on the appliance also permits sharing this information across all websites within the same domain that are protected by the appliance.

To use authentication, authorization, and auditing, you must configure authentication virtual servers to handle the authentication process and traffic management virtual servers to handle the traffic to web applications that require authentication. You also configure your DNS to assign FQDNs to each virtual server. After configuring the virtual servers, you configure a user account for each user that will authenticate via the NetScaler appliance, and optionally you create groups and assign user accounts to groups. After creating user accounts and groups, you configure policies that tell the appliance how to authenticate users, which resources to allow users to access, and how to log user sessions. To put the policies into effect, you bind each policy globally, to a specific virtual server, or to the appropriate user accounts or groups. After configuring your policies, you customize user sessions by configuring session settings and binding your session policies to the traffic management virtual server. Finally, if your intranet uses client certs, you set up the client certificate configuration.

To understand how authentication, authorization, and auditing works in a distributed environment, consider an organization with an intranet that its employees access in the office, at home, and when traveling. The content on the intranet is confidential and requires secure access. Any user who wants to access the intranet must have a valid user name and password. To meet these requirements, the ADC does the following: