Auditor vs IBM Security zSecure comparison

CA Auditor for z/OS (CA Auditor) is a powerful mainframe tool architected to help you achieve and maintain compliance with the myriad regulatory requirements that govern your business and IT systems. It enables you to perform an automated technical review of the system, hardware and software environment and to identify integrity exposures in z/OS. CA Auditor is designed to help you simplify auditing activities and eliminate manual processes so that users without in-depth experience can perform an extensive operating system review.

Auditor helps organizations ensure the security, integrity, and regulatory compliance of their mainframe environments. It provides comprehensive auditing capabilities that monitor and track user activity, system changes, and data access on the mainframe. By analyzing and reporting on these activities, Auditor helps organizations detect and respond to security threats, identify compliance violations, and investigate potential breaches or unauthorized activities.

Auditor Features

Auditor offers the following features:

• Comprehensive Auditing: CA Auditor provides extensive auditing capabilities to monitor and track user activities, system changes, and data access on the mainframe.

• Real-time Monitoring and Alerting: It offers real-time monitoring of critical events, allowing users to receive alerts and notifications when specific security incidents or policy violations occur.

• Customizable Audit Policies: Users can define and customize audit policies based on their specific security and compliance requirements. This allows them to focus on the areas that are most critical to their organization.

• Compliance Reporting: CA Auditor offers a wide range of pre-defined compliance reports that help users demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX, and GDPR. Reports can then be customized and scheduled for automatic generation.

• Forensic Analysis: The solution includes powerful search and analysis capabilities that enable users to perform detailed forensic investigations. This helps in identifying the root cause of security incidents and understanding the full scope of unauthorized activities.

• Audit Trail Archiving and Retention: CA Auditor allows users to archive and retain audit trail data for long-term storage and compliance purposes. This ensures that historical audit information is available for future analysis and audit reviews.

• Integration with SIEM Solutions: The solution can integrate with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems, allowing users to consolidate and correlate mainframe audit data with data from other IT systems.

• Role-Based Access Control: Users can define access controls and assign roles to ensure that only authorized personnel have access to sensitive audit data and system configurations.

• Interactive Query Interface: CA Auditor offers an interactive query interface that allows users to perform ad-hoc searches and queries on the audit data, providing flexibility in analyzing specific events or patterns of activity.

• Audit Data Visualization: The solution includes visual representation capabilities, such as charts and graphs, to present audit data in a more intuitive and easily understandable format. This helps in identifying trends, anomalies, and patterns quickly.

• Support for Mainframe Environment: CA Auditor is specifically designed for IBM's z/OS operating system, ensuring compatibility and optimized performance in mainframe environments.

Auditor Benefits

Some of the benefits that Auditor provides are:

• Enhanced security and compliance

• Comprehensive monitoring and tracking of user activities

• Real-time alerts for security incidents

• Customizable audit policies

• Pre-defined compliance reporting

• Powerful forensic analysis capabilities

• Integration with SIEM solutions

• Role-based access control

• Interactive query interface

• Visual representation of audit data

IBM Security zSecure V2.1.1 suite consists of multiple individual products designed to help you administer your mainframe security, monitor for threats, enforce policy compliance, audit usage and configurations, and assist in compliance management and audit reporting.

IBM Security zSecure Admin, IBM Security zSecure Visual, and IBM Security zSecure CICS Toolkit together provide administrative, provisioning, and management components that can significantly reduce administration time, effort, and costs, and help improve productivity and response time, as well as help reduce training time for new administrators.

IBM Security zSecure Audit, IBM Security zSecure Alert, and IBM Security zSecure Command Verifier together provide security policy enforcement, audit, monitoring, and compliance management capability. These offerings help ease the burden of compliance audits, help reduce the time and costs of performing compliance and monitoring, can improve security and incident handling, and can increase overall operational effectiveness.

IBM Security zSecure Adapters for QRadar SIEM V2.1.1, new to the suite, collects, formats, and sends enriched mainframe System Management Facility (SMF) audit records to IBM Security QRadar SIEM to be included in the enterprise-wide integrated security information and event management (SIEM), log management, anomaly detection, incident forensics, and configuration and vulnerability management.

IBM Security zSecure Features

IBM Security zSecure offers the following features:

• Centralized Security Administration: IBM Security zSecure allows users to centrally manage and administer mainframe security configurations, user accounts, and access controls across multiple systems, simplifying the complex task of security administration and ensuring consistent security policies.

• Auditing and Compliance Monitoring: The suite provides comprehensive auditing and compliance monitoring capabilities, capturing and analyzing security events, generating detailed audit trails. It assists organizations in meeting regulatory compliance requirements and internal security policies.

• Real-time Monitoring and Alerting: Users can leverage real-time monitoring and alerting features to proactively detect and respond to security incidents or suspicious activities on the mainframe, enabling timely incident response and reducing the impact of potential threats.

• Security Event Visualization: With its graphical user interface, IBM Security zSecure offers convenient representations of security events, system settings, and more. The solution provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface for easier analysis, reporting, and visualization of security-related information.

• Command Verification and Policy Enforcement: IBM Security zSecure's Command Verifier automatically validates and audits system commands issued by privileged users, helping enforce security policies and reducing the risk of accidental or unauthorized changes.

• Compliance Reporting: Users can generate detailed compliance reports using IBM Security zSecure to demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements, industry standards, and internal security policies.

• Integration with SIEM Solutions: IBM Security zSecure integrates seamlessly with Security Information and Event Management solutions, allowing for the correlation and analysis of mainframe security events alongside events from other enterprise systems.

• User Behavior Analytics: IBM Security zSecure incorporates advanced analytics capabilities to detect anomalies in user behavior, helping identify potential security threats or insider risks through behavior profiling and anomaly detection algorithms.

• Secure Configuration Assessment: The solution enables users to assess and validate the security configurations of mainframe systems, ensuring compliance with best practices and industry standards while identifying and addressing potential security weaknesses or vulnerabilities.

• Secure File Transfer: IBM Security zSecure facilitates secure file transfers between mainframe systems and external entities, employing encryption and secure protocols to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of data during transit.

• Mainframe Vulnerability Assessment: Users of the solution can conduct vulnerability assessments of mainframe systems using IBM Security zSecure, identifying and remediating potential security weaknesses and vulnerabilities to maintain a robust security posture.

• Mainframe Forensics: IBM Security zSecure provides capabilities for mainframe forensics, enabling detailed analysis and investigation of security incidents and unauthorized activities, aiding in incident response, and supporting post-incident forensic investigations.

IBM Security zSecure Benefits

Users of IBM Security zSecure will experience the following benefits:

• Simplified security administration

• Improved access control management

• Comprehensive auditing and compliance monitoring

• Real-time monitoring and alerting

• Seamless integration with SIEM solutions

• Advanced user behavior analytics

• Integration with Identity and Access Management systems

• Role-based access control (RBAC)

• Mainframe vulnerability assessment