Get your IBM i Security Assessment without the cost of a formal audit.

The economic downturn during the past few years has resulted in fewer resources for IT projects, leaving management scrambling to find more efficient and cost-effective ways to utilize the resources that remain.

Ironically, while many projects end up being postponed or shelved during a recession, IBM i security initiatives often become more critical. Disgruntled workers—or those who are simply fearful of losing their jobs—become tempted to act in ways that they might never consider during less stressful times.

In addition, the risk of a business' valuable data becoming compromised actually increases as staff charged with the responsibility to watch for illicit activity becomes over-burdened. The old adage of having to "do more with less" has never been truer and can be fatal.

However, there's often a lack of clear direction regarding the tasks and priorities of securing your IBM i system. Sometimes, there are known vulnerabilities that clearly need to be mitigated as soon as possible—such as application users running with *ALLOBJ special authority. But often there isn't a thorough understanding of what's wrong with a server's configuration or what should be addressed first.

One approach to this problem is to hire a security consultant to perform a full audit of the environment and map out the priority of the resolutions. Unfortunately, the number of professionals that truly understand IBM i security is small; the number that you can hire to perform a good-quality audit is even smaller. As a result, those professionals typically are very busy and command a premium fee for their services.

A better option is to start with PowerTech's Compliance Assessment, a unique tool that can scan an IBM i server in less than 10 minutes and display the results, which are yours to keep, in a dynamic browser-based application.

Evaluation is conducted in six critical areas: public authority to libraries, network-initiated data access, administrator privileges, system security, user provisioning, and server auditing. An executive scorecard rates the server overall, and quick-access tabs provide visibility to the technical details.

An IBM i security expert helps interpret the findings and is available to architect the appropriate solution via a combination of OS configuration changes and software.

Companies that already have a good grip on their security controls still appreciate an independent affirmation of that fact.

As related reading, PowerTech publishes an annual State of IBM i Security report. Using the statistics culled from hundreds of servers, this hugely popular report provides dramatic insight to the most common IBM i security configurations.

Not surprisingly, interest in PowerTech's complimentary assessments continues to rise as modern organizations scramble to comply with increasingly stringent regulatory mandates as well as to satisfy corporate due diligence.

For more information on the PowerTech Compliance Assessment process, get the white paper, Auditing Power Systems Servers.

Robin Tatam is the Director of Security Technologies for PowerTech, a leading provider of security solutions for the System i. As a frequent speaker on security topics, he was also co-author of the Redbook IBM System i Security: Protecting i5/OS Data with Encryption. Robin can be reached at 952.563.2768 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..