The External Security Facility (ESF) is the major security feature of Enterprise Server. One of the major stages of securing an Enterprise Server installation is enabling and configuring the ESF.
ESF uses one or more External Security Managers (ESMs), which are components outside Enterprise Server that help ESF make security decisions and hold security data such as information about users and resource access control rules. ESF communicates with ESMs using ESM Modules. The process of hardening ESF involves both ESF itself, through the security configurations used by various Enterprise Server components, and the security manager definitions which tell ESF how to connect to ESMs. Each security manager specifies an ESM Module, and the hardening process that is specific to that module.