Cendura Automates IT Controls For IBM Enterprise Software
Change and configuration management platform optimizes application management through automation for IBM enterprise software
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—December 20, 2004 -- Cendura, a leader in continuous IT control solutions for enterprises, today announced it has developed a suite of Blueprints for IBM products that discover, capture, and track virtually every configuration item or element of an application's state. This functionality allows organizations to implement IT controls in order to manage regulatory compliance initiatives as well as achieve high service levels that meet availability, security, reliability, and performance requirements.
“With out-of-the-box support for IBM components, IT organizations can begin to manage applications more efficiently and gain operational benefits immediately,” said Rick McEachern, Chief Marketing Officer, Cendura. “With the visibility provided by our platform and the ability to create, run and audit policies that govern important settings and configurations, IT organizations can implement a level of IT control that previously has been nearly impossible to achieve manually. This level of precise, granular control is particularly valuable to companies who must demonstrate evidence of IT controls for regulatory compliance.”
Supporting IBM’s enterprise software including WebSphere, AIX, and DB2, Cendura’s Cohesion software allows IT organizations to use the IBM suite of Blueprints to discover an entire IBM infrastructure (including multiple instances and versions) of Web, application, and database servers, their relationships, and other dependent components.
IBM application components are kept in an advanced Configuration Management Database (CMDB) providing a centralized repository where configuration changes down to the element-level can be viewed and tracked. Discovered components are automatically added and constantly updated to provide an accurate and consistent view of all application inventories.
All distributed application state data is captured in “snapshots” that serve as baselines of the application and its underlying infrastructure at a point in time. Change detection capabilities quickly identify changes in the infrastructure between and across days, months or years. Also, Cohesion can compare different environments such as staging to production, production to recovery environments or a golden master reference configuration to deployed instances of those applications.
To address regulatory issues, IT can create and audit general and application IT configuration policies that govern performance, security, regulatory and standards adherence. Best-practice policies for application configurations can be applied against snapshots to create comprehensive compliance reports and produce evidence of IT controls for compliance. Using Cohesion to inspect and enforce application configuration policies, IT can manage the application to truly attain continuous compliance.
IT organizations can also manage all aspects of change and configuration management, including scheduling IBM-related configuration changes to run automatically or on-demand to enforce application configuration and best-practices policies. In addition, Cendura offers a powerful Blueprint Builder that allows IT organizations to create a Blueprint in minutes for any custom application.
Cohesion can even track changes within a database. IBM DB2 Universal Database (UNIX and Windows) tables can be viewed and all of the changes to those tables can be tracked between environments and hosts. To accelerate troubleshooting, flexible search capabilities allow IT to quickly find specific configuration information within the IBM Blueprints to pinpoint where problems exist and state-to-state comparisons can be run to determine changes that were made.
All capabilities of the Cohesion Engine are accessible to other enterprise applications through standards-based and flexible APIs, allowing developers and systems integrators to create custom adapters to a variety of back-end systems such as IBM Tivoli, BMC Patrol, and HP OpenView.
Cendura includes the following IBM application Blueprints out of the box:
IBM HTTP Server 1.3 and 2.0 for Unix and Windows
IBM Websphere Advanced Edition v4
IBM Websphere Single Server Edition (UNIX and Windows) v4
IBM Websphere Application Server (UNIX and Windows) v5
IBM Websphere MQ (UNIX and Windows) v5
IBM DB2 Universal Database (UNIX and Windows)
AIX v4 and v5
Pricing is based on each customer’s infrastructure configuration, number of servers managed, and the expansion modules selected. To learn more about Cohesion, visit http://www.cendura.com. To arrange a demo, call (866) 263-3911 or e-mail sales@cendura.com.
About Cendura
Cendura delivers continuous IT control through Cohesion, a platform for change, configuration, and compliance. For more information about Cendura, call 866.263.3911 or visit http://www.cendura.com. Cendura, Cohesion and Blueprint Builder are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cendura Corporation.