Usage Scenarios

Education and Libraries

Muse Proxy offers convenient access to students and professors

In many cases access to protected licensed content is offered based on transparent IP authentication, sometimes based on a single address. End-users would be required to have direct access to such an IP, but this requires both awkward network configuration for on-campus access and VPN access from off-campus. Not to mention the fact that access from mobile devices would be hard and not even possible for all VPN types.

Through Muse Proxy on-campus and off-campus access is granted using specific access rights, so no matter where they are, student and professors, they will have easy access to the resources they are entitled to use by means of the authentications they were provided with, with no changes to other browser or system settings. Access is convenient even on mobile devices.

To cope with the targets IP authentication, Muse Proxy supports proxy chaining and even multiple IPs on the same instance.

Muse Proxy isolates and protects organizational sensitive credentials

Organizational credentials for accessing licensed resources constitutes sensitive data and at the same time are a burden for each user to handle.

Muse Proxy ensures the decoupling of such sensitive credentials from the normal usage scenarios, keeping the credentials and resource URLs transparent with regard to end-users. In some cases Muse Proxy can be configured to direct the end-user to a certain page after the log in happens against the target, making the end-user experience even better.

Only the administrators can see the access details of the used/configured resources. End-users never get in touch with those details, so there is no risk of unauthorized/direct access. No one else will have access to them. Also there is no need to purchase expensive site-wide licenses. Using Muse Proxy Applications and the Authentication Groups you can restrict access to resources only for the needed departments.

Muse Proxy offers library patrons access to bibliographic databases

Library patrons at home or elsewhere can log in through their library’s Muse Proxy server and gain access to bibliographic databases to which their library subscribes either based on IP, user/password or other credentials. All happens via a single sign on interface grouping all the entitled resources.

The navigation of the resources is handled by the Muse Navigation Manager component of Muse Proxy which rewrites the URLs on each resource page, even generated by complex JavaScript, so that subsequent requests will again return to the Muse Proxy host. No alteration of browser or other settings are required.

Direct transparent IP access is still possible if the patron access the Muse Proxy entry point from within the library.

Statistics data can be used to discover if certain resources are not used at all or have very limited interest.

Muse Proxy reduces hardware

Does your University subscribed to resources using many IP(s) and thus it is using too much hardware?

Muse Proxy Server can run on a machine that has multiple IP(s). Thus, instead of having many physical or virtual machines running with many Muse Proxy instances, it is enough to have just one, no matter it is physical or virtual. This means saving money for both hardware acquisition and for power consumption.

Our adjacent scripts permit a good management of physical IP(s) of the machine. On the other hand, Muse Proxy Administrator Console allows the management of the IP(s) Muse Proxy will use, IP(s) that can be any subset of the ones on the physical machine.

Muse Proxy offers better network and subscription change control

The access from the in campus computers to the Content Providers is done many times by authenticating all the IPs used by these computers to the target sites. There are situations when the campuses are changing the Internet provider, thus the entire class(es) of IPs. These are delicate changes, especially when there are subscriptions to many content providers. If there are also network practices in place such as 1:1 NAT and there are different access groups for the resources, based on their IPs, the transition gets even more complicated.

If all the on-campus access to the Content Providers is put through Muse Proxy then this offers a fluent control of these changes, because there is just one or very few different IPs that need to be re-accommodated with the Content Providers. Moreover, if you own a small stable set of IPs for authentication purposes then there will be no change at all to manage with the Content Providers, when the end-users computer change IPs. It is quite probable that you can own few IPs and these will not change with the Internet Provider as the rest of the campus IPs do and that is why there is no need at all to notify all your Content Providers.

Business and Enterprise
Software Integration