PentaSafe Stays VigilEnt on AS/400 Security
PentaSafe Security Technologies, Inc., (Houston) a developer of enterprise IT auditing and security software, has just released the VigilEnt Security Management Solution. Aimed at the e-business market, VigilEnt provides auditing, vulnerability assessment, security management auditing and protection software for enterprise systems, applications and business-critical data from a single point of control. VigilEnt runs on AS/400, Windows NT, Unix, and Linux operating systems, as well as Apache. Support for Netscape, and Microsoft IIS Web servers is expected to be released shortly.
VigilEnt allows companies to proactively diagnose security weaknesses with automated enterprisewide reporting, and alert security personnel of suspicious system activities via pager, e-mail, or the VigilEnt Security Manager—the central interface of PentaSafe’s technology. Future versions of VigilEnt will also offer on-the-fly upgrades.
VigilEnt uses communication technologies such as Java, XML and CORBA to provide a flexible security management architecture that can be extended across multiple operating systems and applications. A single ODBC database repository stores key security data gathered from each platform and enables reporting, diagnostics and analysis on common issues (users, groups or files) across these platforms and applications in a single report.
“PentaSafe has the most complete solution that deals with the different aspects of auditing, as well as controlling and managing security. We also offer an enterprisewide console to examine multiple systems and locations so they can be managed from a common point,” says Bill Vance, VP of R&D at PentaSafe. “We’re adding more and more of the e-business enterprise functions to fall within the management control. People are going to need that once they start looking beyond the bounds of a single system, and we have a common strategy and console to do that.”
The target market for the PentaSafe product offering has traditionally been the banking industry, where security is naturally a big concern. Lately, they have been targeting auditing companies, or those businesses that have more than one platform, remote systems, or remote access to control.
Adventist Health in Winter Park, Fla. is an information services provider for a healthcare network of hospitals, providing a centralized data processing for all the member hospitals. David Walker, the senior system administrator in the Midrange Group, selected PentaSafe’s VigilEnt product primarily because of the exit point programming—where PCs access AS/400s through back doors. “We noticed that very little security development was being done in that area,” says Walker. “We had written some in-house programs to secure those points before opening the systems to PCs, but with the huge rise in the use of the internet, it was obvious that we needed something that was much more intuitive and provided greater security.”
Adventist Health must do auditing as a requirement of its industry, because patient records and information must remain secure. With the PentaSafe product, Walker is able to standardize security policies systemwide. “PentaSafe provides a lot of useful tools for monitored virtually everything on the system—if you want to and have the storage capacity.”
Walker looked at other security products, but felt that none addressed exit point programming as well as PentaSafe. He has been using the PentaSafe product for almost a year with two large AS/400s that are split by time zone.
“I think PentaSafe offers an excellent product for what it does—and what it offers to the AS/400 community,” says Walker. “Unfortunately, in this field a lot of people don’t realize some of the problems that may occur on an unsecured AS/400.”
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