Whether you have a custom-written application or a third-party application, such as JD Edwards or Infinium, it's likely you've created a unique security implementation for the applications' libraries and objects. Or, if you haven't reworked the entire application, you may have secured a specific file containing human resource information or credit card numbers. If you have modified a third-party application's security scheme or just modified the access to a single file, the next application update will replace your security-driven library and object authority modifications. If you have your own application, it's difficult to make sure that items like object ownership, *PUBLIC authority, and many other security attributes remain consistent between updates. The application vendors aren't interested in your unique application deployment. They are interested in refreshing their code across all of their clients' systems. And let's face it--for most programmers working on a custom application, checking all these details is usually not a high priority when promoting new code or code modifications into a production environment.
The problem is that, with all the new laws and regulations governing data access, privacy, and system security, there is a renewed focus on security policy and testing to make sure you adhere to your own policies. Managing your system now entails dealing with auditors who want to know how your implementation reflects your security policy.
The question is this: How do you avoid the hassle of needing to constantly check your unique security implementation against your policy without wasting a lot of time? The answer: SkyView Policy Minder for OS/400 and i5/OS.
Let's take a quick look at how you might use Policy Minder to make sure your security scheme stays intact. With Policy Minder, you can define library and object templates. These templates, in essence, define your security policy as it applies to your OS/400 or i5/OS system. With Policy Minder, you can run a compliance check that compares your library and object security settings against the policy you've defined with your templates. Any non-compliant items are listed. You can then use Policy Minder's FixIt feature to set the security characteristics of your libraries and objects to be in line with your defined security policy. The nice thing is that the policy you define can check everything in the library, so you no longer have to deal with manual checking or random checking of objects, hoping that you don't find any issues. You now have the assurance that the library and all of its objects are checked, and you have the means to automatically deal with any compliance issues.
Other Ways Policy Minder Makes Compliance More Attainable
You've just learned how you can use Policy Minder to make sure that you remain in compliance with your security policy, but think about other ways beyond security that you can use this product to manage your system. For example, the Policy Minder templates, compliance check, and FixIt features give you a practical way of making sure that programmers adhere to change management procedures. One of the biggest problems that IT personnel face is dealing with change management. How often does the following scenario happen? A programmer makes a change to an application object and quickly promotes this change into production because it's needed. Later on, something fails with that object, and a new programmer is assigned the task of fixing it but can't get access to it because that object is owned by the original programmer rather than the application. So you have to "chase down" and deal with ownership issues for application objects just to get what could be a critical fix into production. If you used a template within Policy Minder to check your application objects, you could quickly identify this sort of issue and "FixIt" prior to its becoming an issue.
Finding production objects owned by a programmer can also be an indication that your organization's change management process is not being followed. If the process had been followed, the object would have been owned by the application owning profile, not the individual programmer. So in addition to avoiding security issues with programmers owning production objects, you can monitor the use of your change management process.
These are just a couple of examples of issues you may face when trying to keep a security scheme intact on your OS/400 or i5/OS system. Policy Minder helps identify and fix these issues automatically and provides the assurance that your system configuration is in compliance with your security policy.
Check out SkyView's offerings in the MC Showcase Buyer's Guide.
Carol Woodbury is co-founder of SkyView Partners, Inc., a firm specializing in security compliance management and assessment software as well as security services. Carol is the former chief security architect for AS/400 for IBM in Rochester, Minnesota, and has specialized in security architecture, design, and consulting for more than 15 years. Carol speaks around the world on a variety of security topics and is coauthor of the book Experts' Guide to OS/400 and i5/OS Security.
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