Protecting your IBM i operating system from cyber attacks or insider threats should be an everyday consideration. Knowing exactly what your security, auditing and compliance needs are can be a little more complicated and depends on a number of different criteria.
Last week, we looked at what business benefits iSecurity from Raz-Lee Security can bring to your organisation. In this blog, we look at the questions you should be asking your organisation to understand your business needs for each product.
If you have any questions, or require further information on the benefits of any of our products, why not contact us?
Further information on all the iSecurity products can be found on the Raz-Lee products page. In addition, you can click on the product names below to access a more in-depth description of each product at razlee.com.
Audit
If you have been asked by senior management to provide audit reports, or been asked by your auditors for security-related audit trails and similar reports then, as the name implies, Audit provides the ideal tool for IBM i compliance requirements.
Audit has an easy-to-use report generator and scheduler, which features more than 200 ready-to-run Audit reports that will make your job easier and be able to answer these questions:
- Are you able to quickly investigate potential security breaches in the system journal (QAUDJRN)?
- Can you check user’s activities, current vs. baseline system values and user’s object access rights?
Firewall
If you are being asked if you are sure that your IBM i operating system is not being hacked – and prove it by your auditors, then Firewall is the product your business needs.
Firewall enables you to easily detect remote network accesses and, most importantly implement real-time alerts to trap hackers.
It will also allow you to limit certain users (such as non-employees and contractors) to work:
- from specific IP addresses
- on specific applications
- at specific times of the day
- on specific objects or applications
- with limited activities on specific objects.
Authority on demand
If you are being asked any of the following types if question, the Authority on Demand product provides the answer:
- Is your management or auditors worried about the increasing number of outside consultants, vendors, etc. who are accessing your system and data?
- Would your senior managers or auditors want to automatically receive a full audit trail of the activities of such users?
- Is it sometimes necessary to provide additional authorities to employees? For example at non-standard hours of the day, weekends, holidays, etc., in order to perform required tasks that they would normally not have the rights to do?
AP-Journal Business Analysis
When your auditors want to know who, what, when and which then AP-Journal Business Analysis provides them with the answer.
- Do your auditors want to know who changed business-critical data; when the data was changed; what was changed; and from which IP address it was changed?
- Do your auditors want to know who viewed or read sensitive information overnight or over the weekend?
- Do your security and application managers want to be notified, in real-time, when business critical data changes by more than a pre-determined amount or percentage?
- Is there a need to develop new functionalities in existing applications without programming, using only AP-Journal product definitions?
Visualiser
If you want to look at the overall picture of your IBM i security, Visualizer provides a Business Intelligence system for your data so you can search for trends regarding who is accessing the system, what servers are being used, which transactions are being rejected, etc. It will help you to answer these typical questions and requirements.
Is it important for your system administrators to be able to:
- Through a web-based GUI interface, visually show hundreds of millions of security-related log records instantaneously, in order to find the “needle in the haystack”?
- Pinpoint security events with a minimum number of clicks, so they can analyse whose activity generated a security event, on which date, from which program and from which IP address?
- Drill directly to the data itself?
- Automatically generate an alert based upon a security event which occurred?
Compliance Evaluator
Ensuring compliance with PCI-DSS, SOX and related legislation can be a complicated a time consuming process. Often senior management want to see an overview of how the organisation is performing against that legislation – and have asked for:
- A single color-coded Excel spreadsheet containing summary percentage compliance scores for each LPAR in the network and detailed listings pinpointing the items which lower the compliance score
- Out-of-the-box, ready-to-run PCI, SOX and HIPAA compliance check lists.
Password Reset
All the features of standard IBM i password management, plus the ability to provide a reset function for self and assisted forgotten password reset answers these common questions:
- Would your users want a personal, easy-to-use and fully protected method to reset their own passwords?
- Would your Help Desk want to offload some of their responsibilities by empowering users to reset their own passwords?
Command
If your IBM i system administrators need the following, then Command is the iSecurity product for you:
- Do your system administrators want to easily limit and monitor use of system and CL commands by specific users?
- Do your system administrators appreciate an extra level of protection by filtering the use of specific libraries and/or command parameters in specific commands?
Assessment
Windows-based, Assessment gives you an in-depth look at the relative strengths and weaknesses of your IBM i server security. It will help you answer these common requirements:
- Do you want to obtain a thorough report of your system’s security status in less than 10 minutes?
- Do you want to develop security-related “base-line” reports showing your site’s security progress over time?
- Do your system administrators want to obtain best practice system value suggestions for specific parameters which do not adhere to industry standards?
Capture
In your organisation, if it is important for regulatory purposes to collect, store, search and “play back” actual screen shots of user sessions, then Capture meets those requirements, giving your auditors with a full history of the actual green-screen images viewed and modified by specific users.
Change Tracker
If your auditors require a fool-proof methodology and supporting reports which ensure that the Change Management System has not been circumvented either maliciously or inadvertently, Change Tracker monitors and logs object changes in production libraries and IFS at the source and object levels.
Native Object Security and IFS Object Security
Native Object Security and IFS Object Security give your system administrators an easy and efficient way to define native or IFS object security rights. They will also appreciate the Artificial Intelligence wizard which analyses object security rights and suggest structured templates as a starting point for protecting native and IFS objects.
They will also provide an easy facility to set system-wide objects rights in accordance with pre-defined templates,
Central Administration
If you want the ability to manage your systems and LPARs running iSecurity from a single workstation, Central Administration provides that functionality. It will also enable you to run reports over all your systems or a subset of the systems and receive the reports directly to your e-mail as HTML, PDF or Excel files.
Anti-Virus
If the answer to these questions, then iSecurity Anti-Virus is the product you need:
- Is your IBM i IFS storage used to transfer files between PCs connected to the IBM i?
- Do you want to protect against viruses in e-mail attachments?
You can download a FREE IBM i anti-virus licence from Raz-Lee, just contact us.
Anti-virus software is an integral part of compliance with legislation such as PCI DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. You can easily upgrade from the free version to total security at any time.
Posted by Paul on 29th January 2015.