CA revises mainframe security management software products

Computerworld - CA Inc. today announced revisions to three well-established identity and access management software products for mainframe z/OS customers.

The focus of the changes is on increasing efficiency and reducing costs, said Lina Liberti, vice president of security management marketing at CA. Two of the new products, eTrust CA-Access Control Facility 2 Security r9 and eTrust CA-Top Secret Security r9, are designed to protect mainframe data sets from unauthorized access. The revisions allow more detailed security controls and longer passwords, as well as more detailed auditing and reporting on multilevel security data sets, she said. Both products have been on the market for 20 years. The new versions start at $26,000 and replace versions announced in early 2005.

The third revision is eTrust Cleanup 2.2, which is designed to make it easier to run consolidated reports of user IDs and profiles for a department or zone on a mainframe, Liberti said. Pricing starts at $62,500 per CPU. Cleanup is especially important to mainframe customers, since mainframes are sometimes decades old and may contain user authorizations for people who have left the organization, she said. "This way, you can get rid of unused authorizations," Liberti said.

Customers had asked for improvements to all three products to help them prove compliance with federal mandates such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, she said.

Joanne Kelly, senior information security analyst and consultant at Boston University, is a user of Top Secret and Cleanup and is looking forward to the revisions, although she has not yet tested them.

The BU mainframe contains more than half of the university's business data and all of its student grades. "We have to keep that stuff secure," said Kelly. "Both products have absolutely paid back their cost. We've had ROI a million times over." She said administering security on the z/OS mainframe is simple compared to running security on Windows platforms.

The CA releases continue a trend in the industry to provide management security that extends from the desktop to the mainframe, said analyst Rich Ptak of Ptak, Noel & Associates in Amherst, N.H.

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